130: Women React to Mormon Land w/ Matt Bowman and Brooke LeFevre

Mormon Land recently followed-up the Matt Bowman’s Salt Lake Tribune article with an interview of Matt and Brooke LeFevre discussing the growing numbers of “Mormon types” who no longer believe Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. Join us as we discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of this interview.

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[00:00] Michelle: Welcome to 132 Problems revisiting Mormon polygamy. This week was supposed to be part two on the Whitney documents where I talked about the Whitney letter, but it has been a crazy busy week. I mentioned before that I have 6 children still at home, plus my missionary and my other kids up and out. But with my kids at home specifically, it has been a busy couple of weeks as a mom. So I haven’t yet been able to get that one done. It’s well underway. But it actually is kind of good news because I have had this panel discussion in my back pocket. Some of you will remember the Salt Lake Tribune article that was written by Matt Bowman, and then that was followed up by a Mormonland interview, and I found it to be, well, very, very interesting, both good and bad, and I put together a panel of women. To discuss it. Some of these women will be familiar faces, some will be new faces, but I thought this was such a fantastic conversation that it’s been killing me not to release it. So it actually worked out well that I’m releasing that one this week, and then I will hopefully have the Whitney documents ready to release next week. That’s my plan and my hope. So I want to again And sincerely thank those who have supported this podcast. Um, if anybody else sees it as a possibility to donate to this podcast, it is extremely appreciated. That helps us so much. So please consider if that is something you could do. And thank you to those who have donated and who continue to donate. And um oh I also wanted to mention that this, this discussion we had, I wanted to keep it down to like 1 hour, but of course you get a group of smart women together who care passionately about these um topics and who all have a lot to say and we ended up talking for 3 hours. So this is a longer conversation and the funny thing is we only managed to get through the first half of that Mormon land podcast. So there will be um. The second half coming out sometime in the near future, that, um, I, I, I wanted to, again, cut this down, but it was such a worthwhile conversation that I just wanted to release it in whole. So go ahead and listen to it in chunks as you are able to. But I think it is worth getting to the end because there was a lot of value in this conversation and in the next one that will be coming out. So thank you so much for joining us and enjoy the discussion. I am so excited to be here on this panel of these amazing women who have agreed to come and talk to me. We are going to be responding to the recent Mormonland episode with Matt Bowman and Brook Lefever. We will go ahead and tell you a little bit about that. But I first want to introduce the panel for anyone who needs introductions. So you first will see Karen Hyatt, and Karen has been my editor for, I don’t even know. How long? Over a year, I think, Karen. Has it been coming up on a year? Yeah, OK. And, um, and she has done great work, dedicated so much time to this podcast. She also is a polygamy expert in her own right. She is putting together a documentary on Joseph’s polygamy. So Karen, thank you so much for coming. Anything else you want us to tell about you since this is the first time officially on the program?

[03:12] Karen Hyatt: Not an expert, but The I’m from the, anyone can do it. If I can do it, anyone can. That’s my message.

[03:20] Michelle: Perfect, perfect. And then, of course, we have Gwendolyn Wine, who probably needs no introduction. Gwendolyn has a fantastic YouTube channel. She’s written some great papers that have been published, I believe, in square. Oh, maybe your polygamy paper was just published on your blog because, um, it’s not a people don’t like to publish papers about Joseph Smith’s polygamy not being a thing, right? And then Gwendolyn has excellent videos that I highly recommend and everyone should recommend, I mean, should recognize Gwendolyn. She’s been here several times. And I’ll go on quickly also to Whitney Horning, who also needs no introduction. I, I don’t know how many times you’ve been on the podcast, Whitney, but she is the author of Joseph Smith Revealed, my very well. Worn copy. I’m embarrassed to show you how worn it is. And there it is, yep, as well as several other books. And Whitney, I believe you have an announcement for us of some new books coming out. Oh,

[04:13] Whitney Horning: well, I do. I have Joseph Smith revealed is now available on Audible for all of you who’ve been asking for years, I finally gave in and did it. And um hopefully tomorrow, but possibly um Wednesday, I have a new book coming out, um, essays on gospel Topics. So I’m excited about that.

[04:35] Michelle: Can you tell us a little bit about essays and gospel topics? Yeah,

[04:38] Whitney Horning: it was, um, initiated by a friend who wanted me to put all of my, um, talks that I’ve given over the last couple of years, um, about Joseph and lygamy, wanted me to put those together for her to give to a family member. And so I finally just thought, well, why not just, I have some other essays that I’ve written, some other talks, and then I had a few essays that I wanted to write and so I just kind of wanted to put a little book together and then it’s um title. Is um It is intentional because the church, LDS Church, has the um gospel topics essays that have led a lot of loved ones out of the church, and this book is essays on gospel topics, and hopefully will reignite people’s faith in God.

[05:33] Michelle: Excellent. Thank you for sharing and Gwendolyn, I just introduced you and didn’t let you say anything. Do you have anything that you want to tell people about as we get going? Happy,

[05:42] Gwendolyn Wyne: happy to be here. Um, I do not identify as an academic or a librarian, but if I have to use that tool in my kit, I will, and so I’m gonna be pulling it out today. I will use my master’s in librarian information studies as we talk about these academic consensus and all of that.

[06:01] Michelle: Excellent. And I will tell everyone, Gwendolyn, a huge thank you. She is living in Austria right now, so is up at 4 o’clock in the morning in order to record with us, the only time we could find available. So thank you so much for Gwendolyn. So for doing that, Gwendolyn. We’re going to jump right into this Mormonland podcast, and I’ll just give a really quick introduction of the, of the voices we’re going to hear. So again, you’ll remember anyone who listened to Cheryl and my. Response to the Tribune article, um, Matt Bowman, he’s the, he’s a PhD historian, the Associate professor of religion and history, and the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate College graduate university. So this interview is a follow up to the piece he published in um the piece that the Tribune published, I believe, June 23rd of I was going to say 1844. Can you tell where my brain has been? Of this year of 1924. So this is Matt, and then joining him is um Brooke LeFever, I believe. Oh, did I, is there something else I need to know?

[07:10] Karen Hyatt: What? You’re still one century off.

[07:12] Whitney Horning: You said 192424 fast twice.

[07:18] Karen Hyatt: OK, I’m not gonna edit this out.

[07:21] Michelle: Oh great. See my editors here. She’s gonna make me pay for my lack. Asleep. So I’m sure that’s not the only mistake I will say. I, as I have said so many times, I say to my kids all the time, Listen to what I say, not what I mean. So, um, we also have, oh, I don’t have her name here, um, Brooke LeFever, and she is a PhD candidate at Baylor University, and I really, I’m fascinated by her history, uh, uh, her educational history. She has a degree in, um, psychology and then also a degree in history. She, I believe she’s getting. PhD in history, specifically focusing on women, religion, medicine, 19th century. And I believe that she had something also really looking at, um, like the development of, of contraception. So I was like, Brooke, come and talk to me. I have, um, emailed both Matt and Brooke and invited them on the podcast, or even just to engage in conversation. Matt and I have been having some emails back and forth. I have yet to hear from Brooke. So I’m hoping that at some point I will. Um, cause I always would rather talk to people than about people, you, you know, but I do feel like this. This episode was so wild that it needed to be responded to. And I thought, particularly, one of the things that’s the most interesting to me is it really is women who are the leading voices in this discussion at this point. Um, Gwendolyn and Whitney and I and Karen is doing her, um, documentary. I know there are, I don’t want to diminish any of the men who are also working on this topic. There have been great blogs and great, you know, a lot of good work done. But it’s crazy to me how they are ignoring, putting down and silencing the women who are really leading out in this. So I wanted to have women respond to, to what they are talking about. Also, I know that all of us are members of the church. I know at least 3 of us are active members of the church. So I felt like we would be able to respond to a lot of the claims they make. That’s why I wanted to put the panel together this way. So, do you guys have anything else to say, or should we just dive into it? So since I said that 3 out of 4 are are active, I’m sure people will be curious. So Whitney, do you want to just give us a quick update on your situation and kind of tell us what your situation is?

[09:36] Whitney Horning: Sure, so, um, We are essentially at a treaty with the LDS Church, with our local bishop. If we do not attend church and spread the message that Joseph Smith did not do polygamy, the church will not discipline me. So, Where I basically I’m not allowed to go to church, but I guess if I did, then I would face the consequences of that. But it has been a difficult last several years.

[10:09] Michelle: And so I do want to point out, Whitney, I believe that your husband was the bishop. When this started happening and, and just as, as he was released this craziness started happening with a new bishop that was called. And from Whitney has told me her story, and it is one of these heartbreaking stories. Whitney did not voluntarily stop attending, so I want to say that like she’s found a new, um, sort of religious community, but it wasn’t necessarily by her own choice. So that’s, that’s why I said that it is a tricky situation navigating Bishop roulette and. You know, so, so that’s, that’s what I believe you were also serving in the relief Society presidency or something,

[10:50] Whitney Horning: yes, and so we actually moved from that ward, um, and our new bishop, it was actually incredibly welcoming when we arrived, but he, um, was given directions actually from Salt Lake headquarters, that they would only release our records to him if we essentially made this bargain. So he was kind of put in a tough situation. He’s a great guy. So.

[11:19] Michelle: And from what I understand, it wasn’t like you were proclaiming this at church, right? It just that bishop really started a kind of a witch hunt and contacted all of your friends and family, um, Your daughter’s fiance’s family, like there’s a lot of crazy stories. Whitney has been pretty crazy. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty tough to be Whitney has told me how much of a loss that has been for her. So, OK, so thank you for letting us clear that up. Now we can dive into the conversation. So there is a short um newspaper article that I’ll link below about the Mormonland um episode, and there were just interesting things in that. I don’t know if anyone wants to Comment on it. I’m always bothered by how they invert the timeline they act like these things started happening and then the RLDS Church admitted that Joseph wasn’t a polygamist as you you know what I mean like it just all gets convoluted to create a cause and effect that isn’t there so I’ve talked about that before, but we’ll go ahead and just dive right into the clips from the um podcast. So here’s the first one.

[12:30] Dave (Mormon Land): What is the evidence that Joseph Smith practiced plural marriage?

[12:35] Michelle: OK, so good first question and um I think that they were the tone, the the the feeling I got from that first question and from this whole discussion actually. is that they expected answers more along the lines of what we got from Ben Park in his recent um TikTok videos that he released based on Matt Bowman’s article. So I’m just gonna play a a quick recap of his recent TikToks to kind of set the tone of what this discourse is usually like on this topic.

[13:08] Ben Park: Every single credentialed, published and respected historian who has examined early Mormonism agrees that Joseph Smith both taught and practiced polygamy. I looked at every single piece of evidence. It is overwhelming. Joseph Smith was a polygamist. The documentary evidence is clear. Historians who know the documents are unanimous. In agreeing with the scholarly consensus that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. There is no historical question that Joe Smith practiced polygamy, especially in Navu. We have contemporary records, we have accounts from those involved, we have uh documentation from the period itself, not a lot. We still have to piece things together, but there’s no historical question that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy, and he practiced it quite a lot.

[13:58] Michelle: So that’s, isn’t that what we’re used to hearing.

[14:02] Karen Hyatt: I’ve never heard anything that I’ve never heard anyone talk like that. Wow, that was amazing.

[14:08] Michelle: It was amazing, wasn’t it amazing? And that’s a PhD expert, published author, multiple books, a professor in this field. And so I think that that is irresponsible. And, and I think that this kind of language is why so many people who aren’t necessarily educated on these topics act like we’re conspiracy theorists, right? Like this trickles down from the academic community. So I wanted to play that because one thing about this Mormon land, um, Conversation that I was really happy about was how much more measured they were in their language on these topics. And, um, I, so Matt Bowman, between, cause I didn’t sense that in his article, but he and I emailed back and forth quite a bit in between the article and this Mormonland episode. And so I don’t want to claim any because I pushed back on a few of the things. And so Cheryl Bruno told me that she thought I could claim some responsibility for the different Tone here. I don’t know if I can or not, Matt, I, I don’t, maybe you would have showed up this way anyway, but this is why I think engagement is so important because I think that it is really hard to overstate like that when there’s someone pushing back and calling you out, right? And so I think that we should all keep trying to engage, and I strongly recommend that the scholars in this field engage and be willing to, to open dialogue and discourse because it will make you better. What Ben Park said. It’s going to embarrass him at some point, I believe, if it doesn’t already, and this was much better. So I’ll go ahead and play Brooke’s answer, and then I’ll let you guys respond to it.

[15:49] Brooke LeFevre: Um, historians, when we analyze primary sources, we like to analyze different criteria to look at the validity of historical documents, and one of the ways that we analyze that is how contemporary the document is to the event that happened. um, so do any document that’s recorded very close to the actual event is typically given more credibility than sources that are recorded decades after the event.

[16:15] Michelle: I thought that was a super interesting response to her question. She said, What’s the evidence? And Brooke was like, Well, we have to, these, these are the principles of good analysis of the historical documents, which I, I loved that answer, didn’t you guys?

[16:30] Karen Hyatt: I did. I, I thought it was great. I was like, yay, you know, getting off on the right foot.

[16:35] Gwendolyn Wyne: I really liked Brooke a lot. I, I get that she’s needing to shore up the academic consensus because she’s a PhD candidate, so she really can’t walk in there and say, guess what? These, these YouTubers, they’ve got it. She’s really got shore it up, but, um, but I thought that the, the things she was saying were right on, right on target. Um, she just didn’t want to apply them to this situation that’s happening. And so because it’s awkward to, to admit that some things have happened in the last 8 to 10 years that that academics have not really wrestled with yet.

[17:13] Whitney Horning: So I, I think that um we would be a really interesting topic for somebody’s PhD. Like, wouldn’t this be super fascinating for somebody to really research what we’re doing and the impact it’s having? I think that’d be pretty fascinating. So, Brooke, if you want to change your thesis,

[17:37] Michelle: or, yeah, we will all give you interviews and talk. We will talk to any of you. I think that is an excellent idea that you’ve just proposed, and I hope someone sees how relevant and fascinating that would be. That would be a sure way to get published pretty quickly while you are just working on your doc doctoral dissertation. So, excellent idea. I, I had the same thought as Gwendolyn, that she laid out fantastic principles. I just wish that we could see them apply them a little bit better to this topic. It’s like they know the things they’re supposed to do, but for some reason they fall out the window when, when we talk about this. So we’ll go on to listen to one of her admissions in this answer.

[18:23] Brooke LeFevre: So as far as contemporary sources, we do have several contemporary sources that um give evidence to Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy. One of the most important ones is the William Clayton diary that details not only William Clayton’s experience with polygamy, but also Joseph Smith’s experiences with polygamy and Joseph Smith’s teaching William Clayton about polygamy.

[18:47] Michelle: OK, really quick question. I want to ask each of you. Did any of you hear anything brought up in this discussion that you weren’t already already aware of?

[19:00] Whitney Horning: No.

[19:01] Michelle: I, I get the impression that they think that we are ignorant and that we are just, they, in fact, we’ll get to what they repeatedly make the claim that we’re just based on motivated reasoning and right. And so hearing, this is part of the reason that I’ve become so much more confident in my conclusions is become, because every time I speak to or engage with or hear from the best experts in this field, I’m like, that’s it. That’s all you’ve got, and you haven’t listened to our responses on it, right? Like, do any of you find the William Clayton, I mean, the fact that when she brings up, we have contemporaneous sources and she goes to the William Clayton diary, right?

[19:42] Whitney Horning: Yeah, yeah she were no sighting of Joseph Smith himself. Right, you know, so we’re already to a secondhand person. And they bring up, I think later about William Clayton and 132, but if you go look at at the little bits that we’ve been allowed to see of his Nu journal, it’s affidavits about 132, and then it’s a letter stuck in the back. So, and then there’s obviously, I mean, I shouldn’t say obviously, I’m, I’m super curious what the LDS Church is going to do with the William Clayton journals. They’ve um announced that they are working on those. Um, so I’m super curious if they’re going to release the actual images of them so that we can do a comparison and and see if they’re later. You know, because it was very common at the time to write a reminiscence, but write it as if it was happening day to day. And so it’d be written 1020, 30 years later, but they would write it as if they were, it was taking place and being written the day it was taking place. So I’m curious if, if there’s analysis being done on them, if they’re You know, every what what they’re doing to them, but again, it’s, it’s one person. And so we’re going to lay all of this at Joseph’s feet because one contemporary source that was pro-Mormon, there’s plenty of sources that are anti-Mormon at the time, which I did find interesting that they didn’t mention those.

[21:18] Michelle: I found that interesting too. I did you have something, Karen?

[21:22] Karen Hyatt: I do. I, I want to talk about the Clayton diary entry for a minute because, or for maybe 2 minutes because it’s so important that’s their number one guy, right? That’s their number one contemporaneous evidence. So, on July 12th, 1843, Willard Richards, Willard Richards, not Clayton. Um, was Joseph scribe keeping his journal at the time for Joseph. And on that date, Willard Richards wrote, received a revelation in the office in presence of Hiram and William Clayton. That was on Joseph Smith’s behalf. So that’s all that says. We don’t know what the revelation was. And as you guys know, 4 days later, Joseph was preaching about eternal marriage. And even the Joseph Smith papers acknowledged that that was the first time he published. taught about eternal marriage. So I’m like, OK, already, there’s a breadcrumb for you, like that could have been that. We don’t know. But on the same day, William Clayton writes in his personal journal, which is what we’re talking about here, this a.m., I wrote a revelation consisting of 10 pages on the order of the priesthood, showing the designs in Moses, Abraham, David, and Solomon having many wives and concubines, etc. After it was wrote, Presidents Joseph and Hyrum presented it and read it to Emma, who said she did not believe a word of it and appeared very rebellious. OK, that was what was written on the day. 30 years later, Clayton writes out in his own hand a sworn affidavit, and here’s part of what that says. Hiram said to Joseph. If you will write the revelation on celestial marriage, I will take and read it to Emma, and I believe I can convince her of its truth, and you will hereafter have peace. Joseph smiled and remarked, You do not know Emma as well as I do. Hiram very urgently requested Joseph to write the revelation by means of the Urim and Thummim, but Joseph in reply, said he did not need to, for he knew the revelation perfectly from beginning to end. Joseph commenced to dictate the revelation on celestial marriage, and I wrote it. Hirum then took the revelation to read to Emma. Joseph remained with me in the office until Hiram returned. When he came back, Joseph asked him how he had succeeded. Hiram replied that he had never received a more severe talking to in his life, that Emma was very bitter and full of resentment and anger. Joseph quietly remarked, I told you you did not know Emma as well as I did. Joseph then put the revelation in his pocket, and they both left the office. This is huge. One account says it was Hiram, the other one says it was Hirum and Joseph. That happens all the time. People make a little mistake like that or they remember wrong. The one that he wouldn’t remember wrong is the early one that says it was Joseph and Hirum. The later 130 years later is the whole story. Hiram begged for it. Hiram took it to her. He came back. He’d been yelled at. All the details and the whole story of the details revolves around Hiram took it by himself. That is a lie. It’s made up. It doesn’t match his on the spot testimony from hours after it happened.

[24:50] Michelle: Right, Karen, Karen, didn’t you hear Brooke just say that we always prioritize later sources over the contemporary, oh wait, wasn’t it the opposite, right? So should we expect that 30 years later he has this fulsome account filled with details and it’s 30 years later he controls exactly what happened, the fact that it’s so much more filled out that much later as opposed to the event on the day. I, I will also add to what you were saying. We also should look at things that they never look at like the June 8th and 10th City council records where Joseph and Hiram both were saying this was a revelation on eternal marriage and it had nothing to do with polygamy. So we have so many points that show that this is what this is, and they ignore all of those and just rely on that 30 year later William Clayton record and can’t acknowledge that they’re breaking their own rules.

[25:44] Karen Hyatt: That’s exactly it. And not only do you say, well, you should prioritize, uh, like, half the people watching are probably like, Oh, well then we’ll prioritize the early one. No, the later one can’t be true. So you can’t say, Well, I’m gonna believe his early one. He shoots his credibility to pieces with that later fabrication. And that’s what’s exciting. It’s like, you’re done with Clayton. You, you can’t use them anymore.

[26:10] Michelle: I think, I think for me, what’s even more convincing is looking at the, um, events of that day. You know, I talked about it to some extent in one of the exposit episodes, but look, it’s like tracing out the day of July 12, 1843 and finding out when all of these things happened. That to me is what expose, is one of the things that exposes Clayton. There are many more things and for me, I, I just differ with both of you just a little bit, Whitney and Karen, because for me it doesn’t even matter if it was written in Navu or later because we already know he was a Navu polygamist, right? And so he could have been writing this account in his journal coming up with it. The journal is so funky with these different portions that are here and there. They’re, they’re, you know, it’s so hard to explain it. So to me he very well could have been in Navo trying to come up with an alternative story of what Joseph was doing, right? I think that the credibility of it rests in trying to find other things to back it up, and I don’t find other things to back it up. Other sources, I find other sources to refute it. Um, Gwendolyn, did you have anything to say before we move on?

[27:13] Gwendolyn Wyne: I do. One thing I think that’s good to keep in mind is that for the historians. The, the idea that they would just discredit and throw away all of this quote unquote evidence is just, it’s just too much. Because they love these stories. They are able to craft a narrative using these stories. If you take away and say, well, the reason that this is incredible is because of XYZ, that takes away a huge, um, tool for them, right? Like, all the affidavits that were later and all the And we know who looked into this, how many stories were told. Just story after story after story. I mean, it is a, there’s volumes and volumes that have been written about the stories that people told about the time later. And so to just say, well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna not use all those as our, as our primary sources because they might not be credible. It kind of just takes away. Almost all of their evidence and then what are they supposed to work with, you know, it’s very frustrating to, to say you can’t use this anymore. I know that you’re not saying you can’t, but I think that’s why they’re so reticent to let go of all these stories that they’ve been using to write their books and write their papers and to develop all these theories and to get their PhDs and to have their careers than to say these aren’t credible, it’s just, it’s too much to take in, I think.

[28:36] Michelle: That’s interesting. And I would actually disagree and say, you absolutely should use these. I like, let’s talk about it later, but they accuse us of ignoring evidence. I think the exact opposite. I love looking into this evidence and trying to piece it together and see if it’s credible or why it was said, or, you know, we’ll get into all of that. But just like Whitney made a suggestion for a PhD, um, um, study, I think actually studying Joseph Smith’s polygamy as a PhD candidate would be fast. fascinating because I am telling you the evidence is strong. It is strong and it is credible. People don’t want to believe that yet, but it’s just because they have to be part of the club. Like, they can’t come out as a, like, that, that contrary, yeah. They can’t be that big of a contrarian. I think everyone’s too afraid. But if there is someone willing to actually dig into this, like, so much work has been done that we can just hand up a PhD, um, candidate or just any historian. You would change history. Your name would be known. And, and I know you can think, yeah, I’d be known as a laughingstock. I don’t think so. I think someone should take our evidence seriously and consider it. And, and then if it’s not credible to you, fine, don’t do the work. Don’t, don’t write it up. But I rec I mean, they’re letting us have the glory because eventually this is going to change. The evidence is too solid for it not to. And so, um, let’s go on to she does go ahead and I’ll just play these couple of clips and explain what she says.

[30:00] Brooke LeFevre: Uh, the bulk of our sources do come later. Uh, starting in about 1869, Joseph F. Smith and other leaders in the Mormon Church start compiling affidavits and other documents to try to prove that that Joseph Smith did practice polygamy.

[30:19] Michelle: So she, she goes on to say that I don’t want to sell, sell her short. She goes on to say that we have private writings, letters, public speeches, she restates private and public writings, but then she again admits.

[30:32] Brooke LeFevre: Um, so we have the bulk of our sources do come from the later years.

[30:37] Michelle: And I find that interesting because I don’t think the bulk of the sources come from later years on this topic. I just think the bulk of sources that they consider and look at are the later ones. That’s quite an admission that they’re not looking at the evidence of, of Navu, the actual bulk of evidence that we have there, right? And so so do you have something to say Whitney, if anyone has,

[31:02] Whitney Horning: I know exactly what you’re saying is that if you’re going to take the the bulk of evidence during Joseph’s lifetime. It’s going to skew almost 100% to him denying it, denouncing it, fighting it. Um, publishing things against it. And then he dies and then you, you know, and then, then we start the book of evidence that he did it. So I find that interesting.

[31:33] Michelle: It is, and you just made me realize the way to think about this. I think what happens with the historians or the polygamy pushers, whatever we want to call, you know, the various factions that insist on Joseph’s polygamy. They take all of this later evidence and let it shape their perspective and then apply it to the evidence in Joseph Smith’s lifetime, right? Whereas I think that we tend to look at all of the evidence in Joseph Smith’s Smith’s lifetime and use that as a lens to view the later. Evidence right? I think that that’s an interesting, um, conversation to have and, and I think the question is which should be considered more credible because those are two just various viewpoints and I, I guess as someone I think all of us have spent time in both perspectives, right? Didn’t we all know that Joseph was a polygamist? And so it, it was, well, we’ll get to that conversation later, but I think that all of us have looked both directions of this and have found this one to be much more viable, right? Much more, um, convincing and compelling. And so it’s, and, and we’ll get into whether that’s just motivated reasoning or if it’s intelligent women looking and tell. Intelligently and, um, thoughtfully at sources and coming to conclusions, each of us individually, independently, right? I guess, I mean, I mean, like, I think we all came to these conclusions through our research. So, OK, I’ll continue on to now what Matt says that I have a lot more to say about this part of it.

[33:07] Mathew Bowman: I think uh Brooke hit the really key sources here which are in large measure um these affidavits, and there are, I just want to emphasize that there are dozens of these from many different women whom Joseph Smith married, but also um from some men.

[33:25] Michelle: I have to ask, is woman the new word? I throughout this, they say, OK,

[33:32] Whitney Horning: I just have to say I have a son, one son, and this is how he pronounces it, his entire life. It drives us insane. We have actually, his sisters have sat him down and worked on pronunciation. We, we. And he said, he’s like, yeah, one woman. Now, when.

[33:55] Karen Hyatt: You know what, uh, one of my,

[33:58] Whitney Horning: I thought, oh my goodness, my son’s not the only one out there, so he’s not alone. I

[34:03] Michelle: would think it’s just mat, but Brooke tries to do it too. Sometimes she slips and says women instead, but I looked up, is this like a new feminist thing? And I couldn’t find any information on it. I’m so confused.

[34:14] Karen Hyatt: One of my favorite guests, one of my favorite guests that you’ve ever had, she said, woman. Instead of women, and so I’m super patient now and I’m not gonna say who it is. You guys will just have to all go back and watch all her episodes and find out who it is. But anyway, it was like, where,

[34:29] Michelle: where does that go. Was it an academic scholar? No, is this no? OK, OK,

[34:35] Karen Hyatt: just a mom, and it was like, OK, and then these guys are like trained and it was just odd. I was like, woman, why are we saying woman? But anyway, I, I wasn’t gonna say anything, but you did.

[34:48] Michelle: But to the more important point that he said, I found it interesting that he focused on making sure we know there are affidavits from men as well. Uh, that confused me. Like, are they somehow more credible? Why?

[35:04] Karen Hyatt: No, I think he’s. I, I think he’s just saying that the men back up the stories. Oh, I sealed them together. Not only was she married to him, but I, I’m the one that sealed them and stuff like that. So, to, to them, they’ve just got scads of evidence. And if you call like, what Mosiah Hancock, who’s like, Oh my gosh, Fannie Alger was trapped in a tower and they had to go get her out. And luckily she was in the 2nd story window, but they were able to get her out of there in Crazy town, which they all say is crazy. And then they go ahead and quote him though on Fannie Eldri. It’s like, wow, wow.

[35:38] Michelle: Well, I, I haven’t yet done my episode on the affidavits. Specifically, I want to do one on the 69 affidavits, which is the first bunch that we have primarily put together by Joseph F. Smith. But since I haven’t gotten to it yet, and since they are saying how credible these are and how this is the bulk of our evidence, I wanted to just show a couple of examples to explain why we find them less credible than they do and why I personally, I think all of us are a amazed that these scholars just insist that we accept all of these affidavits as fully credible and more credible than the contemporary evidence. So let me just show a couple of examples. I went ahead and started with 2 by men because he was emphasizing that we have them from men as if, I don’t know, I kind of heard that as like affidavits from women aren’t substantial enough. We also have them from men, you know, maybe I’m being unfair. But, um, but this first one is by Thomas Grover, and I’ve spoken about this one several times where he claims, well, and I also will point out all of these, these are not these people’s own words, particularly the women. They tend to be form letters written mostly by Joseph F. Smith, I believe, may or may not be signed by the women, even ones that appear to be signed from my research, some of them I think look like kind of. Tortured attempts at, at forging signatures, you know, like, so, in any case, these aren’t the women’s own voices. But to do these men’s quickly first, Thomas Grover claimed that Joseph or or Hiram, I can’t remember which one, sealed him to these two Carolines, but if you go do his um family. Search, you see that he was never married to more than one wife at a time in Navo. One had passed away, the other ceiling happened after Joseph and Hyrum had passed. So we know, we, we, we can verify that he was not being, shall I say, accurate. I can either say he wasn’t being truthful or he wasn’t being accurate in his signed affidavit. The second one we have is Joseph Bates Noble, which he’s a riot, and with the, I’m sure you could talk to us for a long time about him. This is where he claims that um that in 1841 that he sealed Louisa Beaman to Joseph Smith, right? And we know that he hadn’t even moved to Navvo at that point and then later affidavits and Temple Lot he throws out all kinds of dates, none of them work. And we just his his story, I mean, his biographer later on explains this all away by saying he was really bad with dates, and we just accept this and I think it’s crazy, right? So those are the two affidavits. Did anyone have anything to say? I’m talking a lot.

[38:20] Karen Hyatt: So my, but, um, so Don Bradley, who I totally respect, like, he’s pretty open-minded, but Don Bradley was like, look, he gives 3 different dates, 3 different years. He goes, but they’re all in the spring. So we know it was in the spring. I was like, What? What? Where’s this logic? And then he goes, so it, but it couldn’t have been April of 1841 because he hadn’t moved there yet. And he says, quote, So we moved that back a year. I was like,

[38:46] Michelle: right? Based on what? And it’s also, I, I, I’ll go into this later in the affidavits, but we have all of these stories of polyandry and of pregnant wives. All of this comes only from these, um, form letter affidavits of women saying this happened. None of them say, I was married to so and so or I was pregnant. They just are signing the affidavits they’re supposed to sign and no one thought to do the work to see if it worked, right? Because nobody ever in Joseph Smith’s life or in any of these women’s life, never. None of them ever claimed that they were married to another person and Joseph Smith at the same time, or pregnant by another man and married to Joseph Smith. That’s all our later coming to these affidavits going, instead of, instead of seeing these form letter affidavits and saying, ha, there’s a problem with this one. She was already married and pregnant. We just go, Oh, Pollyandry. That’s how much credibility we give them. It’s crazy to me. So we’ll go to the next couple that I grabbed these. I’ve, I’ve talked about most of these in other episodes. These are Sylvia. Lyon affidavits and these are fascinating because they are the best example we have to show how clearly these were form letters that are not the women’s own words. These both say on the bla and also I, I’ll go into it more, but there are two versions of most of the affidavits, both in Joseph Smith’s hands, both, I mean, it’s, it’s just crazy town on F.

[40:08] Karen Hyatt: Smith,

[40:09] Michelle: Joseph F. Smith, yes, thank you. On the blank day of blank appeared before me. Sylvia Lyon. Oh, and he misspelled her name. So it’s, it’s spelled with a C instead of an S. So I’m sure Sylvia, these are her own words, right? She just didn’t know how to spell her name, and the way she spelled it everywhere else. Um, let’s see, was sworn in due form of law and upon her oath, say that on the 8th day of February 1 of them says 1842, the next one says 1843. So again, got to cover our bases, right? But it’s Sylvia’s own words with her misspelled name and her having nothing to do with this affidavit. She was married or sealed. By the way, that’s the form letter language, this awkward language that’s in every single one of these affidavits, married or sealed. What does that even mean? Right? Married or sealed to President Joseph Smith by blank in the presence of blank. Neither one signed. Yes, these and these affidavits are extremely credible. Oh, we still count Sylvia as a wife, for certain. And she was the best case we had for a child, right, until the DNA evidence showed that Josephine was not her child. Yes, Gwendolyn, Michelle,

[41:17] Gwendolyn Wyne: I’m so glad that you have these affidavits up on the screen because it just really makes the point. Um, when Matt, it felt like when I was listening to Matt, that maybe he hadn’t. Looked into this very much. When he wrote, well first when he wrote the article for the Salt Lake Tribune, I thought, I don’t think he actually has looked at any of the evidence on the other side. Um he just is sort of like, why are all these people interested in this now? Well, I guess because of the 60s or, you know, whatever. But then But then when he, he seems to have done after his engagement with you a little tiny bit of research, but it really was just more to just say, well, what do we know for sure based on what other people have researched and I don’t have time to do all this myself. But looking at this right here, you can see when he says there are dozens and dozens of affidavits, it’s like, And tell me about those affidavits. Um, the problem is that there have been two huge developments in the last 8 to 10 years that have changed the landscape on Mormon polygamy. And it hasn’t yet been addressed and that’s OK. We’re not saying that the academics, you know, should have, and they didn’t, I mean, they could have, but since they have,

[42:32] Michelle: they

[42:32] Gwendolyn Wyne: should

[42:32] Michelle: have if they’re the leading academics in the field, I mean,

[42:35] Gwendolyn Wyne: but anyway, it, it’s also very recent, right? So the Joseph, I think the two main things that they haven’t yet dealt with are the lack. Of DNA evidence, which is kind of like the biggest deal, that there are no children, and you’ve done episodes about how statistically impossible it would be for a man to be having uh marital relationship with any number of women over any number of time and have no posterity show up, um, not even rumors of pregnancy, right? And then the other one is the Joseph Smith papers. They just finished the Joseph Smith papers, and there is no evidence of Joseph’s polygamy from Joseph. All the evidence is the contrary, that it was added on to Joseph’s story by the people who revised the records and said they were revising the records. So I’m glad you pulled up this, this evidence that that proves it because it just shows how weak it

[43:30] Michelle: is. Thank you. Yeah, and we’re gonna talk more about

[43:33] Whitney Horning: the. Can you go back to the Thomas Grover one, uh-huh. So what’s the date that he claims? He’s claiming they were. Oh, he, oh, he doesn’t give a date on this and very clever.

[43:47] Michelle: Well, he said something in August

[43:49] Whitney Horning: 1843. So just so everyone knows, see, when you get things like this, one of the things you can do is go in and research the people mentioned and, and, and a lot of times you’ll find out that the witnesses. Or they weren’t around, or sometimes the witnesses or the women mentioned have um died before this date, and so they’re not there to corroborate and have their own statement whether or not it was true.

[44:22] Michelle: Right. I think that you really do start to get the impression that these were put together hurriedly in this effort to create this body of evidence, and they didn’t, they weren’t very thoughtful about it. So when you see that happening over and over again, I don’t understand why the conclusion is, oh, it was polyandry with pregnant women rather than, oh, they were really coming up with stories in a pinch, right? Let’s go on to just, I just have two more to show, I think. These are the two from Emily Partridge, and again, these are back to back recorded, and it’s the same wording as all of the others, but they give two separate dates. One of them says March 4th, 1843, and one says May 11th, 1843. Now they can say like Say, misremembering this was many years later. Well, first of all, that’s why we prioritize contemporary evidence, but also they’re not saying, I don’t remember the date. They are giving exact dates and they’re covering their bases by giving two sets of exact dates in case one doesn’t work, is how it appears to me. And I have yet to have someone explain why that’s wrong. And I think I have one more to show. And I Yeah. Can I,

[45:32] Karen Hyatt: can I say about Emily? So her, so it’s really funny because I, I’m like, why did she give two dates? And she does explain in the Temple Lot testimony, it was the court case held in 1892, but on the stand, she explains that she and her sister were secretly married to Joseph in March of 1843. And, um, because Emma was too upset about polygamy, so they just thought it was. Better not to upset her in this, so they just secretly married Joseph because he’s like that. He would just marry these girls behind her back. Well, then, Emma, this, it just cracks me up for so many reasons. But then two months later, Emma was coming around. She wanted, she wanted to she wanted to try to do polygamy, and she was softening toward it. So what did she do for her first foray into polygamy trying to accept it? She gave Joseph two sisters. And I’m like, that’s how she dips her toe in the water. It’s so nuts. So, so here we are. So they both, so their testimony is, well, on May 11th, then, kind of 1843, you know, she said, Oh, Joseph, I’ll give you these two sisters who, incidentally, they had been caring for after their father died. The story’s so abominable. So great. OK, so Emma’s there and she’s consent. to the marriage and she was present and they got married in the Smith home with Emma right there. And all, by the way, Joseph and Emily and Eliza all kept it secret that they were already married because they didn’t want to upset her. So I’m like, OK, already you’re already saying you’re liars, you know? Like, Emily’s like, Well, we, we deceived Emma. I’m like, why are we believing? So then the kicker is that during the testimony, The, the questioner says, Now, you say you were married on May 11th. She says, yes. And he says, and would you swear that Emma was there that day? Yes, I would swear to it. OK, well, let’s look at Joseph’s journal for that day. And he opens it up, and Emma is not in town on May 11th, 1843. She’s in Quincy, 50 miles away. And Emily’s like, Well, I might have got the date wrong, but I, I know I was married to him, and this is what we’re prioritizing. And here’s, here’s what I want to say. We, it’s not, should we believe these women or not. That’s not the question. It’s, should we believe them over Joseph, who never made any mistake like that, who always said the same thing. Every single record we have of his speeches is I didn’t do it. I didn’t teach it. We didn’t teach it. Emma says he didn’t teach it. He never did. Hiram says he never did. It’s abominable, all consistent. So it’s not, do you believe the women or do you just dismiss them? No, you prioritize them lower for crying out loud cause they’re not consistent.

[48:20] Michelle: We believe the consistent sources and the contemporary sources, we, we should all prioritize those and where there’s evidence and where there’s not evidence. Yeah, go ahead, Gwendolyn.

[48:30] Gwendolyn Wyne: I just pulled up kind of some of my notes of what was going on in Navvo at this time. So Joseph had just come out of, he was in hiding because of the assassination attempt on Lilburn Boggs, and he had just finally in January of 1843 been released. And there’s this period of quiet, you would think, between January and, and, um, in that summer, and that’s when all these Um, people claimed that they were all these women were claiming that they were married. I think that they had that little segment of time and they said, OK, we know he wasn’t in jail then or he wasn’t in hiding then, and, and then the revelation was received in summer, so it’s got to be, I don’t know why they thought that it made sense to get married before the revelation, but they, I don’t think there was as you said. OK, um, but during that time, Joseph was mayor of Nauvoo, Lieutenant General of the Navvo Legion, president of the church, overseer of the construction of the church’s temple, owner of the red brick store, manager of the Mansion House Hotel, and he was also husband and father to young children. And so just like somehow everyone believing these affidavits is like, and he had all this going on on the side, you know, and it’s like, That doesn’t make sense, and nobody at the mansion house was saying something weird’s going on here. You know, there’s like something very fishy is going on. They had hundreds of hotel patrons coming through the mansion house and nobody left reporting. that Joseph Smith was engaging in these things. In fact, it was the opposite. People would write and say, the Mormons are being, um, are, are being treated very badly. These things are not true. They’re just rumors. They’re, they’re upright and they’re honest and they’re virtuous, and no one should believe these crazy rumors. And the rumors were from John Bennett, but then also we did have these 12 traveling council who had their testimonies of polygamy, and that was the time when they were really engaging in it. So of course, during that time looking back, they’re like, yes, this was happening at the same time, but there’s no evidence from Joseph’s life that shows that. But you can find evidence, the 12 doing that during that time, there is.

[50:45] Michelle: We have evidence. And what’s so funny too that July 12th day when Hirum or Hirum and Joseph went and, you know, Hirum had the worst talking to. That wasn’t even in the mansion house. That was in the homestead, this little tiny home where Lucy Mac was living, where the children would have been there. Nobody heard Emma give this talking to to Hiram, right? And even still, like, if your brother-in-law came and did that, tried to justify to you in the middle of the day while you’re busy taking care of your mother-in-law, getting all of your children lunch, these women were busy, right? He comes to and sits you down and explains to you why polygamy is so beautiful, because if you don’t do it, you’re going to be destroyed, right? And And then he gets this talking, I mean, they make hire from a complete idiot, and we know that he wasn’t, he was very intelligent. And then Emma gives him this horrible talking to nobody ever reports that, nobody ever heard anything about it. That would be in journals, that would be the scuttlebutt, right? But then the baby that Emma is pregnant with when Joseph dies, she names after Hiram. She named after this brother-in-law who came and told her she’d be destroyed if she didn’t get behind her husband’s ongoing adultery with all of her best friends and all of the teenage girls in town, right? Like, I guess we could take it and so, oh, and say, oh look how much Emma had repented that she You know, felt bad that she had given a Hyramata. I mean, it’s, it’s ridiculous because you can’t ever say she repented cause for the rest of her life she denied it. So every single part of this is ludicrous. I’ll go on to this last slide. And, and the last 10, it’s back here, I think. The last one I included is Ruth Bo Sayers, and I could have included a dozen. These are just the ones I grabbed in my hurry. And this one’s fun because it’s the exact same wording on the blank day of February 1843. Now, see, if you catch this, everyone in the And listening, if you catch the problem here, February 1843, she was married or sealed to Joseph Smith, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by Hiram Smith, presiding patriarch of the church. Does anyone want to explain the problem here? Yes, Gwendolyn.

[52:54] Gwendolyn Wyne: In February 1843, Hirum had not yet received this doctrine.

[52:59] Michelle: He was massively opposed to polygamy, and this is the hilarious story we’re supposed to believe up until May. I think that late May is when we have Levi Richard’s journal saying that um Jacob too was given as a perpetual law and if even an angel came preaching that she would see his cloven foot. But it was just a few days later that Brigham. Gets him to believe the doctrine, and he raises his arm to Brigham and says, and covenants with Brigha that ridiculous story that Brigham Young tells decades later, which is the only story we ever have of Hiram ever accepting the doctrine, except for the fact that in April of 1844, after he had supposedly read the revelation to Emma, after he had supposedly taught it to my counsel, he’s still gather gathered all of the elders together to preach against polygamy, right? So,

[53:52] Karen Hyatt: and, yes, a, a prominent historian points out, pointed out in his essay that this was, uh, 3 months before Hiram supposedly had the tearful experience with Brigham where he’s, oh, you’re right, Brigham, right? And the historian, instead of saying, wow, this must be full of junk, he goes, She may have had her date wrong.

[54:16] Michelle: Yeah, exactly. No. What do you

[54:18] Karen Hyatt: do with that? Like, it’s so not scholarly. I just can’t get over it. And I, I wanted to throw in that these, like you said, there are dozens like this. And here’s the crazy part. None of the historians can decide, can, can agree on an actual number for Joseph Smith’s wives. None of them agree because some of them go, She might have. I believe this one, but I don’t believe that one. They’re like, well, I think she’s OK, but not this one. They, they don’t even agree because the evidence is fragmentary. Yeah, to say the least. But of Brian Hales’s, 35 wives that he is confident were wives of Joseph Smith, 35, over half, 18 of them never made the claim themselves. Not once, not in an affidavit, not in writing, not in telling anyone. Nothing. They didn’t write anything down. There’s nothing from them. And then 6 more are these boilerplate affidavits and nothing else. And 3 of those just say things, they don’t even have a date. It’s like fall of 1840, which you’re like, that’s pretty fishy, but then it turns out they’re the smart ones, because when you pick a day and then Emma’s out of Town, you’re out of luck. So it’s appalling. Oh,

[55:29] Michelle: that’s, that’s what amazes me. We’ll talk about this more. We all agree that these women were not telling the truth, right? The only disagreement is how much truth were they telling. And so the academic perspective is they were telling the truth on every single thing, except for what we have proven that they were. not telling the truth on. But we’re still going to insist that they’re fully credible. Like, when we prove that something’s wrong, oh, they just got the date wrong. Or, oh, but that’s not surprising. It was 30 years later, or, oh, they were married and pregnant. But that’s because of polyandry. Like, we never can just get it through our heads that these affidavits are problematic and should not be prioritized over the contemporaneous evidence.

[56:13] Gwendolyn Wyne: Right? Right? One thing I want to add is that at some point in this discussion, Matt said that there tends to not be a lot of evidence in intimate relationships. So it’s hard to find that. And I thought that was so odd because the, the most evident. You can find is an intimate relationships. My children are the most clear cut evidence that my husband and I have a relationship that could possibly exist. It is indisputable that he and I have a relationship because we have 5 little bodies that we’ve produced. And so that’s just, you know, one little point. But beyond that, We also have my own journals that talk about us. We have our marriage certificate. We have um little cards that we’ve written to each other and letters, and I think it is just bizarre that these things actually exist for the marital relationship between Joseph and Emma and they don’t exist. Between Joseph and any of these other women. Um, and there are some things that people say, what about this and what about that? And those are all the documents that were brought forward by John Bennett. So it’s just who, who said, you’ve awakened the wrong passenger and he was out to get Joseph. So I just think it’s so strange to to make such a claim that there wouldn’t be evidence for these intimate relationships when that’s exactly what children are. That’s the whole purpose of having a marriage certificate is that it provides evidence that you are now a couple.

[57:45] Michelle: Such a good point. I, oh, go ahead, Whitney, then I will. Well,

[57:48] Whitney Horning: so I thought the same thing, Gwendolyn, when I heard that part, I thought, are you kidding me, especially if you’re someone who’s been a journal keeper. And, and that’s important to you. And you’re living in Navvo and the prophet of the restoration, who you believe is going to usher in the second coming of the Lord, chooses you to be a wife, you’re not going to record it somewhere. And I know that Brian Hailes and others, um, You know, brush that away by saying, well, it was secret. They couldn’t record it anywhere. But, I mean, really, I mean, journals were private. No one’s coming into my home and going into my dresser and taking out my journal to see what I’ve been writing about. Like it is my private journal. So I thought the same thing when he said that I thought, oh, come on, that is such a weak, weak argument. You know, give people more credit.

[58:46] Michelle: It’s so funny cause show us the evidence of the search of the SWAT tweet teams raiding Navu, checking everyone’s journals to make sure there’s nothing written about polygamy.

[58:56] Karen Hyatt: Wouldn’t Brigham Young have to be just as secret and as everyone else and yet totally on record marrying Augusta Cobb. Whose husband she she left her husband for Brigham. She had a husband, Henry, and they had children. And when Brigham went on his mission alone, and she followed him, and it’s like, my gosh, we have a court record from Henry suing Augusta for divorce on the grounds of adultery with Brigham. And he won. Uh, what do you, what do you mean nobody left records? Oh, Joe records. That should tell you something,

[59:39] Michelle: right? They, they were safe to talk about it later, right? Because for some reason it was safe later. Well, it wasn’t very safe for Harley P. Pratt, right? He was killed for his, like, can we just stop with the stupid argument? I, I feel bad, but, but these are PhD historians, and it It’s like saying, I mean, you don’t get better evidence than of a marriage. The whole community knows it’s Michelle and Shane Stone, right? We have all of our children, all our names are together on bills. You can find our, um, correspondence, the letters written between us. You can find our, um, shared financial information. You can find all of that. I, I share his last name. Not everybody does that, but Emma did, right? No. Wife has anything to do with Joseph except for Emma. And we say, well, the close relationships don’t leave much evidence. So I feel bad, but I, I’m gonna say it again, and this is no offense, but truly, polygamy makes you stupid. I know these people are smarter than that. These are brilliant people saying these ridiculous things because they need to keep arguing this losing case. Like, this is, that’s a ridiculous, um, Like thing to bring up argument to make to justify there being no evidence.

[1:00:56] Gwendolyn Wyne: So I think one thing that that I’ve noticed is that they don’t, even though in a way they have a losing case, what they want to do is make sure that it never gets to a final definitive truth. And so in that way, they’re going to keep winning because they’re just going to keep saying, well, you know, the evidence is fragmentary, you can never know. That’s a huge thing that they have to make sure is, is just reiterated that we can never know for certain, but if we know something, it is that he did it. But they, they keep making sure that you can’t say for sure. And so, and also it’s very hard, it’s, it’s like impossible to argue a negative, right? And to really prove a negative. So if someone decided to make the case that I was actually an Air Force pilot, and they’re like, look, she was an Air Force pilot and we got 50 people to say it after she died and all these things, and it’s like, well, I mean, I wasn’t. And you can see that because there’s like literally no evidence that I was, you know, but, but it’s very hard to prove that you weren’t something if a lot of people are just like, well, prove it that you weren’t. It’s like, so I think. So even though I

[1:02:04] Michelle: I

[1:02:04] Gwendolyn Wyne: say

[1:02:05] Michelle: I, I think we have moved the dial forward though that they are saying it can’t be proven that’s, that’s a big movement because like you saw Ben Park, you know, they’re, it’s absolutely proven. And so I think that that’s why engagement is important because at this point, I, all I am asking them to do is to acknowledge that there is a valid conversation to be had. This should be recognized. Like I, I was gonna talk about this later, but he brings up again in this Mormon, um, Mormon. Episode, just like he did in his article, the case of Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge. And the fact that he brings that up means that he recognizes that to be comparable to the situation with Joseph Smith and these other wives. The huge irony there is that he fully acknowledges that there is a viable academic disagreement about Anne Rutledge and Abraham Lincoln. You are allowed to say, there’s not good evidence for this, so I don’t think it’s true. So he brings that up as an explanation. As a, as a comparison for Joseph Smith, and yet won’t give us that same credibility to say that maybe we have a viable case for what we’re arguing that can be based in pure scholarship and evidence that isn’t just have to be explained away in these ridiculous ways that we’ll get to at the end that I do find offensive. You know, like I am speaking kind of, um, strongly at parts of this because I had to listen to it about a dozen times to find these clips. And a lot of it is maddening. So, OK, we’ll go on to this next clip.

[1:03:32] Mathew Bowman: Um, so these affidavits are really extensive and come in a variety of different contexts. As Brooke says, some of them were gathered by leaders of the LDS Church themselves, others were given in court cases, um, under oath, um, so, you know, then those then provide some conditional layers of credibility.

[1:03:53] Michelle: OK, so I assume that with that, he’s talking primarily about the Temple Lot case and saying the fact that they were given under oath in the Temple Lot case case gives them additional layers of credibility. I, I haven’t yet done my episode on the Temple Lot case, but I did look up and reread the decision given by Judge Phillips, and it’s delightful. So I’ll let you guys say anything you want to about that. And then I would love to read part of his decision if that’s OK with everyone, cause it’s great.

[1:04:23] Karen Hyatt: Well, can I real quick say that I thought he was talking about the the 1869 affidavits cause those are so numerous, and almost every one of them has a problem where somebody trips up on the date or it doesn’t match with something else. And so it’s interesting. But, but the, the funny thing is the reason, uh, I just wanted to say this about the 1869 ones real quick before you talk about the temple. Lot ones because they were earlier. And the reason we have so many in 1869 was because Joseph Smith’s sons, Alexander and David, had come to Utah in 1866 as missionaries. And part of their part of their message was, our dad wasn’t a polygamist, and he didn’t teach it, and this was with Brigham. Our dad had nothing to do with it. And it was kind of like the little boy, like the emperor has no clothes, because a lot of people were like, My gosh, you’re right. And they left. And Brigham gives a talk where he says, There’s, I have to talk about this. Some of you are giddy headed about something you don’t understand, and you’re running after young Joseph Smith, he says. And I’m like, OK, we have Brigham on record saying people are leaving. So, Joseph F. Smith, apostle at the time, He says, Well, let’s just gather up the evidence that Joseph was a polygamist and present it and put this to rest. And in a letter to Orson Pratt later, and he says, when the subject first came before my mind, I must say I was astonished at the scarcity of evidence. I might say almost total absence of direct evidence upon the subject as connected with the prophet Joseph himself. There was nothing written. And but few living who were personally knowing to the fact that Joseph taught the principal. He couldn’t find anything. That’s why he called in all these women, come right in, come sign these affidavits in my book. And he had two books, and they would sign them. And so we got a couple of dozen women to sign these. There were, how many, anyway, again, here’s the kicker for me. In 1852 was the first time Brigham openly introduced polygamy to the saints in Utah. And there were some skeptical saints. I don’t remember Joseph teaching this, and you can see by the speeches that he’s kind of at pains to convince people, no, no, it started with Joseph. Where were these women in 1852? Why didn’t they have Brigham’s back right then and say, oh no, no, it’s totally true, you guys, we were all married to him. They didn’t say a peep for 17 years until they’re invited in. That’s crazy.

[1:06:56] Michelle: Great point. Yeah, they weren’t, I don’t I maybe one of you knows, but I’ve never seen a journal entry from early Utah, 1852, between 1852 and 1869, of the women saying, finally, we can talk about it. It’s out in the open. I can. I was Joseph’s wife. That would be a relief to these women, right? It doesn’t exist. So such a good point. Those affidavits were absolutely motivated. The women were called in. There’s a lot of evidence for that that we’ll get into. So does anyone have anything else?

[1:07:26] Gwendolyn Wyne: Well, I, I heard the same thing that you did when when Matt mentioned that they testified under oath, and I was like, keep going, go on, uh, where was, where was that testimony and, and what happened there and again, I just, I feel like Matt. Doesn’t polygamy is not his interest. That’s fine, totally fine. It doesn’t have to be your interest, but if you choose to get into the middle of this, it’s really obvious really fast how much you haven’t looked into it because the moment you You start to dig around these sources, they very quickly reveal how the scarcity, the paucity, whatever. They reveal that they kind of come, come down to nothing. It’s like, yeah, they testified under oath and the judge didn’t believe them.

[1:08:15] Michelle: Right, right. Also, we know, like Joseph F. Smith. We know of his lying under oath repeatedly, right? Like these, and we know the entire doctrine of you have to say what you’re supposed to say for the kingdom, lying for the Lord, shall we call it, right? Like this is built in to polygamy and yet We never acknowledge it. You know,

[1:08:40] Gwendolyn Wyne: Joseph F. Smith, I know you’ve talked about this. There, there really were reasons for them to say the things that they said. Joseph F. Smith was a young child when his dad was killed. He’s with his stepmom. Was he with his step? Oh yeah, his mom died. His, his mother dies, but, but when his mother dies when he’s 11 or 12 in Utah, he’s, he’s young. By the time he’s 15, he gets shipped off to Hawaii. Hawaii in 1850 something. That’s a wild place to be sent as a young teenager. And he was sent on a mission there. Really, he was sent because he was unruly. And when he came back, you know, he was willing to obey counsel. You know it. Don’t send me to. Oh, a wild island all alone. I don’t speak the language. I have no way to fend for myself. I have to rely upon the generosity of these people who thankfully kept him alive. But can you imagine sending your 15 year old Oh to to an island with, I mean, it’s just crazy. And so Joseph F. Smith had a reason to say these things. He knew he had to be in line or else. And by the time he was a grown-up, an adult and and president of the church, he had been fully indoctrinated that this was what had to be done to further the doctrine, which was the highest and holiest doctrine.

[1:10:00] Michelle: Right, he was extremely successful in climbing the patriarchal ladder, right? So he had to defend it, and it is interesting, as Whitney pointed out, the reason he was brought in as an apostle was again to combat the RLDS Church that had the lineal succession claims which Judge Phillips even speaks about that. So he was brought in as a very young unruly man under the tutelage. Brigham and Heber into this apostleship and this is where he could be cared for. He could be, um, what um successful groomed. He was, he was completely groomed and it was what he relied on for all of his prestige, all of his validity, all of his financial income, all of like everything depended on supporting the patriarchy. Men get caught supporting the patriarchy just like women do. Right, that and Joseph F. Smith, I think, is one of the tragic stories because it breaks my heart that he’s Hiram’s son, and this happened. So, but he did bring up in this that this was also given under oath, and that gives it an additional weight of credibility, which I guess he doesn’t know about Joseph Smith III or any of these other, you know, because this goes forward into the Abraham Smith trials and that, I mean, like, hearings, that’s what the word I’m looking for. So let me just read a little bit from Judge Phillips, because it’s It’s really fun that RLDS Church actually publicly printed it up and published it because it was so, um, favorable to them. And, and so I’ll link it below so people can read through. But I think it’s sections, I believe it’s specifically sections 9 and 10 that speak to the issue we’re talking about. So these are, I’ll just put a couple of snippets that I was like, wow. So people don’t realize Joseph Smith’s polygamy has been tried in a court of law in America, a very rigorous investigation while the actors, while the original people involved were still alive. So as they constantly say we can’t really get to the truth. Well, you can’t do that, you can’t come to the truth better than they did in a court of law actually trying this case. It’s crazy that we have this, and it’s crazier that nobody knows about it. And so here are just some quotes from his decision. He says there can be no question of the fact that Brigham Young’s assumed presidency was a bold and bald usurpation. I don’t remember, remember that part. He cites the doctrine and covenants to support that statement. He goes on and he says the Book of Mormon itself inveighed against the sin of polygamy, and he cites extensively from the Book of Mormon to support that statement. He says, how can it be that the Lamanites please God by sticking to one wife and the Nephites displease him by intimating David and Solomon and multiplying wives, and yet polygamy is to be the. Down of righteousness in the teachings of the angel Mormon that challenges my my power of comprehension. He says, how that, how that could be true challenges my power of comprehension. He again goes on to cite from the doctrine and covenants. Then he says, I mean, I’m just shortening this down. It’s fascinating to read. He says the claim is made by the Utah church that this doctrine is pre is predicated of a revelation made to Joseph Smith in July 18. In 43. No such revelation was ever made public during the life of Joseph Smith. And under the law of the church, it could not become an article of faith and belief until submitted to and adopted by the church. He knows how our church works better than than we do, you know? This was never done. And so the heterites, he points out the irony. So the Temple Lot case, people don’t really understand it. The hegeco kites were the Temple Lot Church. And they, because they had basically squatted on the temple lot, they claimed ownership of it. The RLDS church later on once they were up and established, were like, hey, we need the temple lot back. So they sued the hedgeraites to get the temple lot back. So the lawsuit was actually between the Temple lot, the Herakites, and the RLDS Church. But the LDS Church was like, holy cow, there’s a trial going on to see if the RLDS church. The legal, um, viable recognized successors of Joseph Smith’s Church. We cannot let that happen. So the so the LDS, Utah-based church got involved on the side of the heterites to, they, they had nothing to gain other than making sure that our LDS Church didn’t win, right? That’s what they were going for. I’m sorry I’m talking so much. If anyone has anything to add in, I just, I love these topics. So I, I’ll talk about them all day long. So I’m gonna keep reading. The judge points out the huge irony of the fact that the heterites rejected polygamy, but relied on the polygamist church to show that they were the valid successors, not the to show that the RLDS Church were not the valid successors. That’s a huge irony. So this is what he says. No more complete and caustic refutation of this claim made by Brigham Young can be found than in Exhibit W in this case in a book entitled The Spiritual Wife System Proven False, issued by. Laville Hedrick, the head of the Respondent Church in 1856, so the Hedrickite president wrote a book refuting polygamy. And let’s see, he ridiculed the pretension of Brigham Young that he had this revelation, unproclaimed, locked up in his private chest for 9 years. He says, Now how strangely inconsistent that the revelation should be given 9 or 10 years before its time and have to lie 8 or 9 years under its patent lock before it would be time to proclaim it. Here they. And we have a specimen of an abortive revelation come before its time and had to be put in the in the sacred desk under a patent lock for 8 or 9 years and shown occasionally, just often enough to get the thing used to it. So then it when it, so then when it got old enough, it could go abroad. So much for this curious revelation come in an abortion, got burned up, then locked up, and now has gone forth to damn everybody that don’t believe in it. Why? It’s a perfect phoenix. That’s amazing. So that’s what the president of the Heterite Church wrote that that Judge Phillips quoted. Then he goes on, he talks about when John John Taylor, who was not the president of the church at this time, he’d already passed, but he says John Taylor was asked why the church of which he is president in the publication of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants of the Salt Lake Edition 1876, eliminated the section on marriage as found in the 1835 edition. And in all editions thereof published up to 1876 and inserted in lieu thereof the the um claimed revelation of polygamy of July 1843. Answer, I do not know why it was done. It was done by the authority of whoever presided over the church. I suppose Brigham Young was the president then. So you, like, oh we don’t know. Brigham Young just did that on his own, right? And the judge points out how that doesn’t follow any of the rules of the church. The Utah Church has introduced societies of secret order and established secret oaths and covenants contrary to the book of teachings of the old of the old church. It has changed the duties of the president and of the 12 and established the doctrine to obey counsel. This is all amazing. He’s recognizing all of these things exist in Utah that did not exist in Navvo, that did not exist with um Joseph Smith. I think I have just one more part to read this. So that was all from Section 9. This is from Section 10. He says, and this is the part most people know, but I’m going to continue on a little longer. This is how valid he saw the testimonies of the supposed wives of Joseph Smith. It perhaps would be uncharitable to say of these women that they have borne false testimony as to their connection with Joseph Smith, but in view of all the evidence and circumstances surrounding the alleged intercourse, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that they were at most but sports and nest hiding. So he says at best they were having affairs with him. That’s that’s the best thing I could possibly examine from this if I’m trying to be charitable to not just say they were completely lying, right? In view, he goes on and says, in view of the contention of the Salt Lake party that polygamy or obtained at Navvo as early as 1841, it must be a little embarrassing to President Woodruff of the organization when he is confronted with the church newspaper in 18 October 1843 certifying that he knew of no other rule or system of marriage than the one published in the doctrine and Covenant. That’s the statement on marriage section 101. Um, that certificate was signed by the leading members of the church, including John Taylor, the former president of the Utah Church, and a similar certificate was published by the Ladies Relief Society of the same place, signed by Emma Smith, the wife of the president, and Phoebe Woodruff, wife of President Wilfred Woodruff. No such marriage ever occurred under the rules of the church, and no offspring came from the imputed illicit intercourse. So can I just. point out that as early, when was this trial, 1892, I believe, right? And Judge Phillips knew that there were no children. They already had settled this question at this point. Brigham Young and the others never even tried to find children because they knew Joseph didn’t have any because they knew he wasn’t a polygamist. It was the later historians and people trying who really did believe that Joseph had been a polygamist who was looking for the children. It’s amazing that Phillip states unequivocally, there were no children and no offspring came from the imputed illicit intercourse, although Joseph Smith was in full vigor of young manhood, and his wife Emma was giving birth to healthy children in regular order and was pregnant at the time of Joseph’s death. Certainly polygamy was never, never promulgated, taught, nor recognized as a doctrine of the church prior to the assumption of Big Briham Young. That’s incredible. Like, that needs to be part of this discussion of this discourse. That was the finding from the very best testimony. So we are still claiming, like, Matt just said these testimonies need to be taken more seriously because they were given under oath without recognizing what Judge Phillips plainly saw from the testimony of the actors actually involved. Go ahead, anyone who we’re all

[1:20:10] Karen Hyatt: speechless. Mic drop.

[1:20:13] Michelle: OK. Thank you for letting me read that. I think it was worth reading. So, OK, we’ll go on. So I guess I would like to say, yeah, do you think that this um movement is growing when we have access to these kinds of sources that have been ignored and never quoted so let’s continue on.

[1:20:32] Mathew Bowman: Um, if we look to Navu itself though, contemporary sources, those are really key. Um, one of the key things that polygamy deniers, those who say Joseph never practiced polygamy, will point to is the relative paucity of those sorts of sources, and there is some truth to that.

[1:20:50] Michelle: I’ll define paucity for everybody. Synonyms are scarcity, dearth, insufficiency, lack, in other words, there are not good there are not good records from Navu, right?

[1:21:03] Karen Hyatt: I like there’s some truth to that. Yeah, there’s some truth, a little bit. As Joseph F. Smith said, almost total lack of any evidence, yeah, something like that.

[1:21:16] Michelle: Yeah, we might, yeah, we might allow that to be somewhat

[1:21:21] Gwendolyn Wyne: true. I just think it’s so strange that they have labeled this, um, this perspective as polygamy deniers because it so clearly is supposed to make us think. About Holocaust deniers. And, um, I don’t deny the Holocaust. I also don’t deny that, uh, the, the Latter-day Saints committed polygamy, right? Like, I think it was a crime because I believe the Book of Mormon. I know they did it, but the main thing that, that this mindset believes is that polygamy is not from God and it’s not good. Um, but the, the academics would like to avoid that entire conversation because you really can’t talk about God in academia, that, that doesn’t work. Um, it’s actually really uncomfortable to talk about good and evil in academia, that’s also really frowned upon. So they They are sidestepping that issue 100%. They do not want to engage on that, um, because all sorts of marginalized groups now in the world, uh, also happen to believe in polygamy and have that as a practice and so that that really puts them in a bind, um, if they want to support. Some, some groups throughout the world, if they want to support some minorities, they can’t say polygamy is bad because some people do that, um, in, in some countries. And so they just, they, they want to leave it alone and they wanna just talk about Joseph Smith and say, well, you guys deny it. And it’s like, I don’t, I don’t deny that he might have. He might have. I don’t think he did. I think your evidence is really weak.

[1:23:01] Michelle: Really weak. And we need to get over the ad hominem. It’s so beneath anyone that would be a supposed scholar. Like, let’s get over the ad hominem, which is what polygamy denier is. I had asked, um, Karen if she would put together a clip of the times. They say polygamy denier in different Demeaning ways throughout this episode, because it’s like, really, that’s what you’re gonna do, like, like, you big fat polygamy denier, you’re wrong. Like that’s, that’s academic discourse.

[1:23:28] Karen Hyatt: Your mom is a polygamy denier. Right, right.

[1:23:32] Michelle: Yeah. And I do also want to say that while we can’t discuss God or good and evil or right or wrong, what we can do is look at, um, sociological outcomes, which has been measured and has been done. The the Canada case. They presented all kinds of, of research that was. Actually done that led the Canadian government to outlaw polygamy, to say, nope, we’re not allowing that here because of the scientifically variable bad fruits of it. Right? We can say bad outcomes, but that’s really what it is, is bad fruits. So I was going to, um, oh, did you have something else, Gwendolyn?

[1:24:08] Gwendolyn Wyne: I’m just pulling my book. This is the one that they used for the Canada case. It was this research that was done. And so even though in academia. It’s,

[1:24:21] Michelle: that’s the studies all are that I’ve seen.

[1:24:24] Gwendolyn Wyne: Oh yes, yes, because the studies come from women’s stats, and that is available free to everyone. um, and this, this, I know I’ve mentioned this before, but the, the PhD who wrote this book does say in the intro, you know, it’s really uncomfortable for us in academia to call something evil or it’s we, we don’t like to do it, but the, the issue is there was no evidence of this being anything but. It’s only brings forth bad fruit, as you said, sociologically and so, so that’s why um that’s why they could she could write this book, um, but she doesn’t connect it to Joseph Smith, of course, um, and again, that’s where our LDS academics want to live. They want to live in this place of Joseph Smith did it, but they don’t wanna, they don’t wanna talk about this. Um, I think that’s kind of

[1:25:12] Michelle: interesting. And, and I will say here I will say that the question of whether good polygamy was good or bad, leads to good or bad fruits, doesn’t really weigh in on whether or not Joseph Smith did it, right? We can’t connect those in an academic discussion. But what we can recognize that I would hope that more, um, scholars and just people in general would recognize is that the belief that Joseph practiced polygamy. Con contributes to the promulgation of polygamy in the fundamentalist, like I could say in the church body today. Like Tanya Toole, who is excellent and she is a great advocate for people trying to escape polygamy or trying to recover from polygamy because it is destructive. It is bad. It does have bad fruits. She said to me, Oh my gosh, if this were true, it would be. Huge. If I could help women and men understand that this actually didn’t come from Joseph Smith, and that it actually is, like, like even the Joseph Smith piece alone, that was the one that she said would be huge. And so I think that just our common humanity demands us to take this evidence more seriously, because there are people’s lives. And well being still riding on this outcome and for you to demean us and call us these names contributes to suffering to ongoing suffering there is a real humanitarian cost to this arrogance and and I think it’s a shame and I would, I do. I call on all, um, historians and all just people involved in this discussion to do. Better because you just think it’s a matter of, I, we’re right, they’re wrong. We are telling you there is a discussion to be had here and your refusal to look at it and your continual demeaning of us and calling us ridiculous contributes to, to people suffering in polygamy, to people more boldly, the polygamist leaders more boldly pronouncing how right they are and how wrong I am. Every, uh, I think other than one, every death threat that I have received has come from current polygamists. So it is a bad system and you are being, I, I will just say straight up, all of you historians are being extremely irresponsible to keep promoting it in this way. You need to do better. I’m sorry, I’m speaking strong, but it makes me really upset that they don’t make these connections. And I’ll also include the anti-Mormons in that. Like I’ve said, John Dehlin won’t have me on the Tribune, would. Publish my article in response, right? Because the anti-Mormons also need to have Joseph be a polygamist. Everything is writing it on it to the extent of, like polygamists always did, erasing the suffering of polygamy, which we’ll get to talking about a little bit later. You also need to do better. This is a shame and you are responsible for what is happening. That’s so

[1:28:08] Karen Hyatt: well said. And I, I, so I have to add this here. I don’t know if you’re going to talk about it later, but I really want to add it right here while you’re talking about what this does to women right now. This hasn’t changed. This did the same thing to the women who lived in polygamy in Brigham’s time, and I want to read, uh, two of these because, um, later, you know, I like so much of what Brooke says in this. I like how she says we need to look at these sources, and we need to weight them. And, and the part, uh, were you gonna cover Emma Smith? I don’t know. Yes,

[1:28:39] Michelle: that’s the part. Oh,

[1:28:40] Karen Hyatt: I love it so much. And she’s like, she’s like, Emma totally denied it. And they’re like, Well, didn’t, did she sometimes not deny it? And, and she’s like, No, no, she denied it every single time. It’s like so great. But, but she, then later, she accuses deniers, these polygamy deniers, she accuses us of dismissing the testimonies of women. And I had to settle down for a second because I was like, Are you kidding me right now? So she says, Well, we have all these public writings from the polygamist women and, and, you know, they need to listen to these and stuff. And I’m like, yeah, we do have public writings from them and public speeches from them. And Brittany Nash, the historian, she talked about how she found that their public statements were like, oh yeah, it’s all good, because they had to put on a happy face, and she attributed it to them wanting to bolster each other up, which you would because you’re just also. miserable. But anyway, in their private journals, however, it was a totally different story. Here’s Emily Partridge that we, the one that forgot her or that got her marriage date wrong. This is her diary, late in life. My mind goes back to days gone by. And what do I find? Can I find anything so pleasant that I could wish to live it over again or even to dwell upon it in thought with any degree of satisfaction? No, I cannot. My life has been like a panorama of disagreeable pictures. As I scan them over one by one, they bring no joy, and I invariably wind up in tears. I have been heart hungry all my life. And she and then she says, I mean it’s a, it’s beautiful and it’s right, it’s so painful, but she says some will understand what it is to be a woman, mother, or an unloved spiritual wife. And then um Two days later, she was again in a dark mood because the next day’s journal entry, so 3 days after the first one, she talks about being in a dark mood the day before again. But she says, today I am looking for the bright spots. Although they may be few and far between, they should not be overlooked. It’s heart wrenching. And then here’s Emmeline B. Wells. She had written and it was published. She said, I’d Women don’t need all this attention from men, and I’m sorry, I’m paraphrasing that, but that’s what she published, was like, women don’t need this much attention from men. They’re not the center of our lives. But in her private journal, right at the same time, she wrote, Oh, if my husband could only love me even a little and not seem so perfectly indifferent to any sensation of that kind, he cannot know the Craving of my nature. He is surrounded with love on every side, and I am cast out. Oh, my poor aching heart, where shall it rest its burden? Only on the Lord, only to him can I look. Every other avenue seems closed against me. I have no one to go to for comfort or shelter, no strong arm to lean upon, no bosom bared for me, no protection or comfort in my husband. And when she said, That we dismiss the words of women. I was like, we do not dismiss their words, they break our hearts. Don’t you dare.

[1:32:03] Michelle: Thank you so much for sharing that with so much, um, emotion and compassion behind it, because I felt the exact same thing, and we’ll talk about it going forward. When they are talking about silencing women, it is these women’s women that they are silencing. It is, they are never acknowledging or paying attention to the suffering, which I would say is for most of us, our primary focus. Right? Is the question, and I know this takes it back to religion, but it is the question of Jacob 2 and 3 versus section 132, right? What do we want the experience of women to be? And all you have to do is look at the different ways that those scriptures view and talk about women to know what we’re talking about and why this Matters so much and why it is wrong, just flat out wrong to remove this from the discussion. Thank you so much for bringing that into it, Karen. That so important. Yeah, go ahead, Whitney.

[1:33:00] Whitney Horning: So just on that same line, thank you for sharing that. It is exactly what you’re saying. We care about women. We, for me personally, I got interested, I guess you’d say in this topic. Because I wanted to figure out what my eternal life was going to look like. I’m very much a practical person and when somebody says you need to do X Y Z, I think through the mechanics of that and what that means. And so, Being married, yeah, can

[1:33:34] Michelle: you back up just one step and say what, how you got interested before that was in your study of family history as a daughter of the top pioneers? Like, I mean, you weren’t thinking at this in a vacuum. You were

[1:33:46] Whitney Horning: right, right. No. So I was, I started doing family. History, I lived, I had the amazing blessing as a child of living next door to my maternal grandparents, and my grandmother would take me down, you know, way before computers. And so we would drive down to Salt Lake City and we would go to the family history library. Where we would find the records and I would just, you know, lot of polygamy in on my side of the family where we just descend from people who joined the church in the very beginning of the restoration and followed Brigham Young West and became polygamists and um So I would just find group record after group record of these family members and, you know, 11 wives, 12 wives, you know, each wife would have dozens of children, I mean, you know, enough children that the man had dozens. And I didn’t really think much. I mean, so I grew up knowing I came from polygamy, and knowing that I had it in my family, but as a young child, and with the records at that time, I didn’t realize what the family situations were actually like. And so then I get married, um, and the church very much, they, they really distance themselves from the idea of being in a polygamist church today. Um, but they very much are, you know, they very much believe my mother-in-law knows that, um, Russell M. Nelson, President Nelson, has two wives. He had a wife that passed away, and he’s remarried and very much believes that he’ll have both of those wives in the eternities. Um, that’s not something just that my, my mother-in-law, that’s why she won’t accept the work I’m doing because she continually tells me, well, what about President Nelson and his two wives? Does that mean he has to choose when he gets to heaven? Right? So I became interested in figuring out polygamy when I got married because it became real to me. Like, is this my future? And if, and what if one general conference, they sent up and announced that it’s back, you know, because we were taught that it was an eternal principle, that um people in the social kingdom, so forth. So as I got older and more um records became online. I started finding family records with divorces, and often it was the first wife. Often the first wife, they would get to Utah, and the husband would take a 2nd, 3rd, 4th wife, and the first wife would often in my family anyway, would divorce the um. The husband and and move away with the children she had. And so I started seeing a lot more of the heartbreak, and I wasn’t seeing so much of the blessings of lygamy that I’d been taught were there.

[1:36:49] Michelle: And could we point out that they didn’t get child support or alimony? Leaving your husband was a really, really big deal. Most women couldn’t do it until they had grown children who could help provide for them. And many women who divorced weren’t allowed to take the children, who either chose a divorce or their husband chose to divorce them, often they didn’t, there were no laws protecting the women, is what I’m trying to say. So it was a big risk to divorce.

[1:37:19] Whitney Horning: Yes, and yes, it was a huge risk. Men very much got everything at that time. But also, if you were a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th wife. You had no legal recourse because there was no legal marriage at all. So, I mean, when they, so to me, anyway, this whole long thing to say, when Brooke said that about believing the women and that if we don’t, when we’re dismissing them and that, you know, she made sure to say that she’s, you know, I don’t know if she’s getting her PhD or she’s got her master’s in women’s issues. In history, and I just think this should be a women’s issue. Like it very much should. And I, I get so, um, upset at the number of specifically men, but also when women chime in and say that their biggest, um, complaint with my book is I just hate polygamy. I’m like, yes. Yes, I do. Because I’ve done enough family history now. And then I was a member of the, um, Daughters of Utah Pioneers for a while, and if you haven’t ever gone to any of their meetings, I don’t know if they still do it, but they used to every single meeting, read about a prominent Utah, who is a man. Always a man and always stories of him coming home from a mission, bringing the 16 year old Swedish girl who couldn’t speak English, and coming home to the wife who’d been holding down the farm and taking care of the children and introducing, this is, you know, my polygamist wife. So I began as an adult to see just the heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak of these stories. And so I think this very much is a women’s issue, and I’m proud of all of us for being voices for women to say, um, God God cares about us, and we are equal in every way to his sons. And we deserve to treat ourselves in that way and to help other women to lift them up. One of the things I noticed in Hebrew C. Kimmel’s letters to his wife, Violet, in other um early writings of these lygamist men. One of the ways I believe that they would manipulate the women into accepting polygamy was they would give them a false pride. They would do it lots of building up and lots of manipulation. You know, Hebrew and violet’s letters went from normal husband-wife letters to just pouring on the flattery, and lots of, you’re the most faithful woman and And I could only be able to do all take on all these wives that God wants me to because you are the one who allows me and just um False flattery. So let’s cut out the false flattery. And stop bringing on these women who have the credentials of women’s issues and actually let’s really get down into True women’s issues. And that issue is at the very core of our hearts, of who we are in God’s eyes, and what our value is in His kingdom. And it’s

[1:40:56] Michelle: beautiful.

[1:40:58] Gwendolyn Wyne: It’s a full distraction too from our, our actual purpose as women because if you believe that men do have this authority to acquire women as, as possessions, right, that we are owned by them and so they, they can acquire us, then of course we’re going to forever be subservient to them. Um, there’s, there’s no equality, and I’m not talking about doing the same thing, but the same value. I mean, this goes back to Genesis. In the book of Genesis, Eve is the Azer neo, the help that is meat for Adam, that’s equal to Adam. She provides that same salvific worth that he does, and so that’s why it’s so important. I mean that’s why you can see this is why. Spiritual forces work so hard against this being unveiled, because once you unveil what polygamy really is, then you say to yourself, just a second, this is not of God at all. And in fact, I am much more than I thought that I was. This man and woman are made in the image of God. That means that God is not a man. That means that God is a man and woman paired, twain, united as one. And it changes the entire landscape and changes everything about who we can become and who our divine nature is and who our divine destiny is. So, uh, like you said, Whitney, I do dislike polygamy for all those reasons. I also like dislike child sacrifice and all the other sins. They’re just sins, but we have this, this group of academics now that are arguing that we shouldn’t really. Talk about it as a sin or anything like that. Let’s just focus on this 11 thing that we don’t really even want to get to the bottom of. Like they don’t even want to find out if Joseph was or wasn’t. They want to keep it in the air. It’s like, yeah, you can never know, but probably he was stop talking about it. And it’s just, it’s pretty underwhelming.

[1:43:07] Michelle: OK, I love what you guys have been saying. I, I feel the need to acknowledge for any historians or scholars listening. I recognize, I think we all recognize that discussing the, um, harmful effects of polygamy on women’s hearts and women’s bodies and women’s experiences does not. is not evidence of whether or not Joseph was a polygamist. We all get that. That what we are, what I am hoping that those people will take from this conversation is the weight and importance of this topic, that is separated from any experiential. Consideration and claim it needs to be talked about only sort of in this like sterile setting of pure academic rigor, right? To do that is like talking about child sacrifice or child sex abuse in a similar way, right? We are asking for recognition and, uh, um, acceptance of that responsibility when you are discoursing discoursing on this topic, and when you Uh, silence women. I’m sorry, we are the leading women in this field, not we’re, we’re not the leading women in this field. We are the leading voices on this topic. I’ve been um, engaging with many historians who say we don’t want to encourage what you’re doing and we don’t want to treat you as viable. And so they are the ones actively right now here today silencing and dismissing women. And saying our voices not only don’t matter but shouldn’t be heard while also saying we shouldn’t talk about the effects of polygamy, they shouldn’t weigh into the conversation at all and refusing to look at our scholarly academic evidence of Joseph Smith’s polygamy. I’m not saying that the harmful effects of polygamy are proof that Joseph wasn’t a. But what I’m saying is the harmful effects of polygamy are additional reason is an additional reason that you are obligated to look at the evidence that we are bringing forward and stop being so arrogant and dismissive to women who are studying this topic rigorously. Who is it that is silencing women? Who, who is, who is it? And I will get to these topics. I we’ll get to these quotes, but I’m actually offended that it’s feminists, self-proclaimed feminists and feminist historians making the arguments that are made in this episode. But I wanna continue on because there’s so much more to discuss. Matt was talking about the contemporary sources we have and right? And so again, he’s prioritizing contemporary sources. He acknowledges that there’s a paucity of sources and he. Again, when he’s talking about the contemporary sources, what he includes in his list are the Clayton diaries. We’ve already discussed those, right? And then he does admit, I think this is so crucial to talk about. He admits we only have transcripts for the relevant portions from 1842 to 1844. That is such an important point that we have the actual Clayton Diaries, although heavily redacted from, um, Up until 1842, his England diaries, we have his pioneer diaries starting in 1846, but for some reason, we just can’t have access to the Navu diaries, right? And yet we’re supposed to accept them as a, um, contemporary source. I’m sorry, if something has not been released, it cannot be considered contemporary. We haven’t been able to investigate it. And even if it is contemporary, we have to know. What the motivation was and how credible it is. So I have a lot of problems with that, but I was glad he at least acknowledged that. I think that is something that should raise flags for everyone. It is insane that all of these scholars are saying, you’re a conspiracy theory for having a problem with the fact that this source that is our main resource, that is our main source we rely on, has not been released. OK. Then he goes on and he lists 132 as part of the contemporaneous evidence. Which I found appalling, right? And he said, we don’t have the original, but we have the Kingsbury copy, which has good provenance. And I died when I heard, um, when I heard Brian Haile say that. And now we have Matt Bowman saying it. It, I mean, it’s like they’re all in the same club of bad arguments. I cannot, so I haven’t done, go ahead, Gwendolyn.

[1:47:36] Gwendolyn Wyne: Well, this is the this is the one thing where I’m like, OK, if you need me to speak with my, with my librarian credentials, let me just sit in here on the table and tell you it does not have provenance. 132 does not have good provenance. It’s extremely contested and that’s why there’s this groundswell of people. It’s so funny that in In this, in this podcast, they really made our point for us. There’s terrible. There’s terrible. They really didn’t come up with much. There were so many awkward pauses. They’re like, Oh well, uh, it’s like, yeah, because 132 doesn’t have good provenance. These affidavits don’t make sense when you, when you view them in light of the context. The judge said this didn’t happen. I mean,

[1:48:29] Michelle: right, that’s. Coming to it again, they’re coming to it assuming that we don’t know these sources. So this is why they lose so much credibility, and this is why we are winning this argument among anyone who’s willing to look at it, honestly and fairly, is because their arguments are terrible, right? So, yeah, so I, I, the, the fact that, uh, the idea that 132 has good provenance cannot be stated, matter of factly and factually is something we all need to accept. It needs to be vigorously debated. Right? Like that deserves vigorous debate. That’s what we are asking for. Yes, I will gladly vigorously debate that with a historian or I’m sure any of you would as well. So let’s stop making, so again, this is what he’s listing as the contemporary sources. For some reason they don’t want to go to John Bennett and William Law, which I think would in some ways be more logical. I, I don’t find those credible at all, right? But so those are the things that he lists and then he says. Um, one more. Oh, and then he talks about the Whitney documents. And I’m gonna skip over those for now because I am I I was already almost ready to record my episode on that, or at least well into my outline when I stopped doing that in order to put together. I spent the last couple of days working on the response to the. To this episode. So I’m not, I’m going to save that discussion for later, other than this one clip I want to play, because he said something that is, that was shocking to me. And I spent a ton of time. I wasted a ton of time looking for what he was talking about until I finally emailed him and I was thankful that he answered my email, but Again, this is a PhD historian. This information is going out there as coming from the experts, all of the information in this episode, which had a lot of false information, but this was one specific claim that I found very surprising.

[1:50:19] Mathew Bowman: Now, again, there is a provenance issue with revelation. We, the original. missing. We have a type script, um, that Newell Whitney’s grandson Orson Whitney made in 2012 of the original. Um there is a kind of a provenance there as well that we have sources describing the existence of this revelation back to 1842.

[1:50:40] Michelle: So he’s talking about the Whitley revelation, which I had studied already, but I’ve been studied much more deeply, getting ready for my episode. So when he said that we have sources speaking to the existence of it, clear back to 1942. I was shocked by that. 18, thank you. 1842. Well, it could have, well, it might as well be 1942 because so. I looked forever and then I emailed him and he explained that I was misunderstanding that he wasn’t saying we have sources dating from 1842 saying there’s this revelation. He was saying we have sources that say this revelation was in 1842, which I think is a silly explanation of that because the revelation itself says that it was from 1842. We wouldn’t need a, do you know what I mean? Like. So I, I guess I’m just pointing out why it’s so important that we engage because they need pushback to be more careful. All of us can misspeak or say things that are not accurate, but if there’s no one there keeping you honest, then it’s a problem because PhD historians do it, right? Mspeak like that. And that was a pretty big misspeak to say that about the Whitney revelation. So. OK, I’m gonna go on to the next clip cause, cause here’s a good question. I really do like Wendell was saying, in several points, and I’ll play one of them. I think the interviewers were not getting what they expected at many points. And they were trying to figure out where to go with what was being said. So here’s, here’s the next question.

[1:52:07] Dave (Mormon Land): That, let me ask you the flip side of that straight up. What is the evidence, evidence that he did not?

[1:52:14] Michelle: So what is the evidence that Joseph didn’t practice polygamy? I know Gwendolyn has already mentioned some of that, but I want to ask the panel, what would we consider the compelling evidence that Joseph didn’t practice polygamy? Gwendolyn has already listed the DNA evidence and being able to actually look at the Joseph Smith papers, right? So those are, those are two huge ones that I have not seen dealt with adequately at all.

[1:52:44] Whitney Horning: Well, I would say his entire. Scriptural works. I mean, the Book of Mormon is very much against polygamy. That is a full-on revelation from him. The revelations in the doctrine and Covenants, numerous ones. If we, if we take out 132, which, if anyone has not ever heard about this before, 132 was not put into the Doctrine and Covenants by Joseph Smith. It was brought out of Brigham’s drawer in 1852, and then added to the doctrine and Covenants when the project began in 1876, and I think Michelle, you said they sustained it in like 1880.

[1:53:25] Michelle: Never sustained was done. Yeah, it was sustained in 1880 after the publication when it had been added as already talked about.

[1:53:34] Gwendolyn Wyne: The revelation itself though was not sustained. They,

[1:53:38] Michelle: the new book which had a lot of they put in the

[1:53:42] Gwendolyn Wyne: pearl of great price, so there was never a common consent for the revelation on polygamy

[1:53:47] Whitney Horning: or so just to say that Joseph Smith’s the Book of Mormon, which is a full revelation. Anti-polygamy, the doctrine and Covenants, if we take out 132, which was not in there when Joseph was alive, then everything in there is about monogamy.

[1:54:04] Michelle: And 101 was in there, which was taken out, right? It’s a stronger

[1:54:07] Whitney Horning: version, right? And then we have his translation of the Bible where he actually, when he, the translation of the Bible, the inspired translation, he actually comes out even stronger against David and Solomon and their polygamy.

[1:54:24] Gwendolyn Wyne: Can I say something about that? That’s something that I’ve been, I’m making a video trying to run through the history, just an alternate gospel topics essay on the history of it if, if Joseph actually wasn’t a polygamist, which I don’t think he was, um, but I’ve been going through that, that, uh, inspired translation of the Bible. He started it in 1830 and by 1831, he had already reached the middle of Genesis with Abraham. And he took a pause and then went to the New Testament, picked back up. But by July 1833, he was done with the inspired translation of the Bible. This is before any of the future polygamist leaders had even come into the church. So, but it wasn’t all published then. He was trying to get it published throughout his life and ultimately was never able to get it published during his lifetime. So they didn’t know what the contents of the inspired translation of the Bible were, and then Emma was the one who took it, protected it. Thank you, Emma. From revision and she kept it, but now we have the original documents again Joseph Smith Papers Project, and we can see that he was not considering that, you know, how Abraham was righteous and all these things because he made no changes to that story that changed the polygamy in any way at all. And as Whitney said the changes that were made related to polygamy more strongly condemned it. So, so that’s a huge piece of evidence and in fact, um. Mormonism with the Murph just did an interview with Richard Bushman, and I was so surprised that Richard Bushman repeated this too, and, and uh Murph did, Stephen did as well, like they both talked about the, oh, you know, when he was translating the Bible, he began to To think about this and started to question it and so we know that he knew about this as early as 1831 and I was like, you guys, the documents don’t support that. Like, why are we still perpetuating this? You have it, it’s like, it’s like they took all the information that came out in the 80s when, when the internet really Made this flourishing Camelot and all that about polygamy research and then they were like, now we’ve got it and we’re done lock it up no more. And I was just stunned that even Richard Bushman, but then again he’s not a polygamy expert. None of the historians that are pontificating about this are uh I shouldn’t say that, that’s not very nice, but because Richard Bushman, he’s a great historian, he just like. I’m not sure if he knows that the documents from the transition will support this.

[1:57:00] Michelle: They haven’t looked critically at this topic specifically and at these, at these questions. What we are doing, they have not responded to, right?

[1:57:07] Gwendolyn Wyne: And so I get it because YouTube, like, why would a a credential historian be like, I’m gonna respond to this YouTube. It’s very uncomfortable for them. But that’s how people are getting their information now, and it’s changing the landscape.

[1:57:20] Michelle: And this is what I just said to So Chris, Christopher Blythe responded to my episode with, um, Cheryl Bruno, and he’s a professor, an ass associate professor at BYU. And in my exchanges with him, it, it’s just been frustrating cause I’m like, all I am asking for is a little bit of humility, a little bit of open-mindedness, a little bit of patience, and a little bit of charity, right? Have a little bit of humility that maybe there’s more that you could learn, that’s possible, right? A little bit of patience because I have said multiple times, I am working on trying to make it possible to add in writing academic articles for the journals. I did, um, I have already proposed to present at the academic journals. I am going that direction. I assume I would invite anybody else who feels like they could help us in that avenue to start composing academic articles. I think that would be helpful to put it on their turf, right? But then also a little bit of Like patients to wait for us to do that, and a little bit of charity to assume that maybe we have brains in our heads. Maybe we are capable of actual critical thought, which they would know about us if they engaged at all, you know? And, and so it’s fine that you haven’t watched our research, but just go, oh, I, I’m not aware of that research yet, so I can’t speak to it. Rather than speaking to it. When you are not aware of it, right? That’s like, just, just take a step back, have a pause and stop, stop, not only assuming, but asserting, putting on your PhD badge to say, these people are idiots. My educated expert conclusion that you all need to listen to is that these people are idiots. Just stop doing that and wait. Until we can move this forward a little bit onto your turf. Either engage on our turf, that’s great, and then speak about it or wait for us to engage on your turf before you speak about it if you’re not willing to engage on our turf. That’s all, that’s all I’m asking for.

[1:59:24] Gwendolyn Wyne: It’s great. They may not choose to allow us to engage on their turf because they are now they’re making sure that the message is this is not acceptable. This is a conspiracy theory and it goes against all academic consensus and one of the things that you have to do to publish is show that you have, you’re addressing the academic consensus consensus. So it will be interesting to see how those efforts go because because they might just say rejected.

[1:59:54] Michelle: Right, I would recommend to anyone listening to this, I would recommend not doing an academic paper on Joseph was not a polygamist. Like, for example, the one I’m working on right now is the work I’ve done on the development of contraception throughout the 19th century, right? So that’s, uh, like I think it’s wise to focus on peripheral, um. Issues that weigh into the discussion but and that we can show solid research on. I think it’s too big of an argument to handle Joseph Smith’s polygamy. I think looking at the changes to the Bible, Joseph Smith’s changes to the Bible and how they relate to section 1 and to verse 1 of Section 132 is a viable topic, right? I think, I mean, there are, I have like a list of 10 papers that I could write today if I just have the time, right? That I think are viable topic. I think we need to narrow it down to smaller things and open discussions, open conversations, right? Look at the, um, problems of the affidavits, even just choosing two affidavits and writing a paper on why those are problematic, right? The these are the kinds of small focus, um, things that are much more success that I think would be much more successful. So I’m giving away my strategy to any historians who might be listening and I will say if you get well rich and well supported articles and you reject. I merely out of gatekeeping this topic. There are enough historians listening that you’ll be called out. I, I like, we, we will, we will expose that and still publish our articles, right? And at this point, I’m not sure that the historians have larger audiences and the academic journals have larger audiences than we do on YouTube. So, right? So like, like, OK, we’ll, we’ll play on your turf, but you better let us into the playground. If, if we are playing by the rules. That’s what I’m gonna say to all of that. So, um, I wanted to add to some of the things that I find compelling evidence. So we’ve talked about the Joseph Smith papers, but some of the specifics there are things like the letters between Joseph and Emma. Joseph’s relationship to Emma is much more available to be seen than it was before. Joseph’s statements about women versus Brigham’s statements about women, right? Joseph, how he put women in positions of power. Show me a polygamist that does that with women who are opposing polygamy, specifically. I showed Brigham in the, um, I can’t remember if it was the 70s meeting or the elders meeting, but where he said, any man who follows this was 1845, any man who follows a woman is going directly to hell. God knew what Eve was. Like Brigham was a straight up woman hater. Joseph wasn’t, right? Then we have the research that Whitney has led out in and done a marvelous job in showing the journals and letters of the apostles in England, the relationships that we’re having happening in England, and the development of something that looks an awful lot like spiritual wifery. I’ve, I’ve started to call it. Divine infidelity. What, you know, like divinely what whatever, whatever we wanna call it, it looks very suspicious, right? But like the, um, the entry that Karen read about Emily Partridge talking about being a spiritual wife, right after we said that that term was never used, that was only John Bennett, so we can find all of these things and then the biggest thing to me. That has been really compelling is seeing the growing mountain of altered documents trying to advocate for polygamy. Like, off the top of my head, the October 5, 1843 journal entry, which even polygamy experts haven’t known what I was talking about. Like, I had to, from, from my experience, I had to explain to Don Bradley. What I meant by that in one of our early conversations, right? And they just don’t know this evidence at all that are some of our main things, but we can also talk about the 8 March 1842 relief Society letter, the, um, Harrison Sagers, um, sermon that will that Joseph Smith gave that Wilfred Woodruff recorded, right? Um, oh, you guys help me like Hirums hirem Hirums. Speech and we could talk about more so we have all of these altered documents that are really important and then add to that the um the massive problems with the later testimonies right and and like things and then diving into things that seem like. Knowledge. If you know about the Whitney Clayton, I mean, the Whitney documents, like Ben said in his, in his TikTok, like, there’s no question. All you have to know is the Whitney Clayton, the Whitney documents, and it’s done until you actually dig into the Whitney documents and realize they’re just like the October 5th sermon, right? I mean, the October 5th journal entry, right? And, and they’re ignoring all the surrounding evidence. So anyway, those are some of the things I find compelling. Anything else that you guys want to add?

[2:04:51] Karen Hyatt: So I want to clarify just cause I know there’s new people watching you all the time, and I, I have friends that haven’t really seen you yet, but they’re interested. So I do want to clarify little things that, that I think can be said in a nutshell, just so that we’re not talking in code to everybody who’s not familiar. So the October 5th journal entry that you’re talking about was Joseph’s entry in his journal that says, no man shall have but one wife. And then you can see on the Joseph Smith papers, the revisions. Made to that, where someone in a different hand has scribbled in, unless the Lord commands otherwise. And it’s like, wow. So that’s, that’s just very briefly what you’re talking about there. The you mentioned Brigham pulling the revelation out of his desk. We’ve mentioned that a couple times, and I just want to read that quote really quick so that they know that we’re not making that one up. Um, on, on August 29, 1852, Brigham is talking about, you heard Brother. Pratt state this morning that a revelation would be read this afternoon, which was given previous to Joseph’s death. I am now ready to proclaim it. This revelation has been in my possession many years. I keep a patent lock on my desk, and there does not anything leak out that should not. And so he literally, we have the Journal of Discourses talk where he says he’s had it in his desk this whole time. So these are not things that are just easily thrown out. And the last thing I just wanted to share was Section 101. We’ve referenced that a couple of times and you’ve talked about it, and we’ve all heard it 50 times, and Michelle’s talked about it in a dozen episodes or more. This is the original doctrine and Covenants, the 1835 edition contained this article of marriage. Inasmuch as this Church of Christ. has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy. We declare that we believe that one man should have one wife and one woman, but one husband. That is what was in our scriptures until 1876. Anyway, there’s some references for the people who didn’t know.

[2:06:54] Michelle: That’s good. And Joseph’s 1843 journal says, no man shall have but one wife. Karen,

[2:06:59] Gwendolyn Wyne: you were just Giving a little bit more flesh to those examples and the relief Society letter that Michelle mentioned, we’ve got it in the minute books and it and it basically says that the letter said the copied. Letter says, do not believe anything about. A spiritual wife for your polygamy, no matter who tells it to you, prophets, seers, revelators, marshalls, Lord Mayors, all angels, angels, the

[2:07:25] Karen Hyatt: Lord

[2:07:26] Gwendolyn Wyne: himself, I think it says

[2:07:26] Karen Hyatt: Lord Mayor, the devil,

[2:07:28] Gwendolyn Wyne: yeah, and then there’s a letter and it’s like which came first? Well, the letter says, um, don’t believe any of these things unless it be by our own mouth, by revelation, and it’s like, all right. I mean, that’s just the exact same change that was made to Joseph’s journal where you say, unless, so they just made the space and um was it Richard van van Wagner wrote about how there was the changes made it very seamless. All these changes were made after the death of Joseph, and they’re all recorded in the history of the church. I spent my time revising, revising, revising on this day we revised the history of the church. And so these revisions were made in 1845 through 1850, whatever. So the documents don’t look very different. They look exactly the same. So you have to go beyond just the date that the document was created in the 1840s. You have to look at the content and say, well, one of these says polygamy is forbidden and the other one has Says it’s OK. So which one came first? Well, we can, we can now trace in a few cases that the first one was revised to say polygamy is OK. And so then you can extrapolate and say, well, the same thing happened here with this letter to the relief society. I

[2:08:47] Karen Hyatt: love it. We can see

[2:08:48] Michelle: it, yeah, we can see it again and again and again. We can see the draft history. That’s what’s so useful. We have the original. We have the draft where it was saying to be revised as a cross out the housing conditions, then we can see the finalized version. And if anyone doubts this, we have all these sources. For example, I love Hiram’s April 8th speech, 1844, right? Because they made changes to it and then still they were like, uh, it’s not enough, we can’t fit this into the story no matter what, and they just erased it from history, right? That’s all and, and it’s now been erased from history again taken off the Joseph Smith papers for very unreason. Reasonable reasons, but I did remember the thing I wanted to say, and it’s in regard to the but one wife, right? Like you can, you can have one wife or but one husband. One can mean at least one, right? It’s how they interpret how they interpret that how Ryan to say. We have to give credit where credit is due. That was also Joseph F. Smith. It was Joseph F. Smith who originally made that argument. And so that’s part of, that’s another thing that I should say has been part of my evidence is seeing the arguments against it, seeing the ways they came up with to explain away everything Joseph said, including people who were in Navo. They, they don’t like, there is no good way to explain it away, and they tried, and then the historians are still making the same arguments today. like the best way to be certain of your conclusions is to talk to the Smartest people who disagree with you and that’s what I did in polygamy. That’s how I first became became convinced that polygamy is not a God because I heard the very best arguments from polygamists and was like, that’s what you’ve got, right? And then the same thing is hap has happened with historians and it’s happening hopefully to many other people with the historians like this is what you have to base that on. So my thing

[2:10:40] Gwendolyn Wyne: is. I don’t have your, I don’t have your list of videos in front of me. I’m trying to remember, did you talk with Brian Hayes and Todd Compton before you did your episode on Joseph was not a polygamist?

[2:10:51] Michelle: With Todd Compton, it was right as I was saying, oh, there are problems with this narrative. And with Brian Hills was before that when I was like, OK, tell us, tell us why we’re wrong. And his answer was, you need to be excommunicated. That’s the only answer he’s ever given me. Like, tell me why Joseph was a polygamist. You need to be excommunicated or you. need to be quiet. That doesn’t help convince me. That helps me know you’ve got nothing, which, I mean, what he’s got is but one, right? Like, not good arguments.

[2:11:23] Gwendolyn Wyne: The spirit of polygamy is to make sure that women only sing one tune. That’s the only tune we’re allowed to see sing and it’s, it’s sustain the brethren, keep sweet. So that’s what’s actually, oh it’s, it’s like too bad, but it’s OK. You started this journey because you were like, hey, I want a show and and have an online conversation about why polygamy is not of God and the, the Joseph Smith was a polygamist question was less important, which I think we all agree is less important than than the

[2:11:51] Michelle: actual theological question he died. Right,

[2:11:54] Gwendolyn Wyne: right, um, but you’ve actually now like honed your arguments as you’ve gone. So you, so some of these uh polygamy experts, historical political polygamy experts you came up against when you were still sort of learning and as you were interviewing them, it was kind of like, oh well. Huh, I didn’t know about those sources, and then you started looking into them and it was like, just a minute, these sources don’t really hold up, but we’re just assembling them in this big group, but, but they’re kind of like a sandcastle, you know, it’s not, it’s not super sturdy. So I just think it would be interesting for you to have these conversations with the polygamy experts again, now that you’ve got some, some really good um historical background in studying it.

[2:12:42] Michelle: So we have given a fulsome answer of what we find to be compelling evidence that Joseph didn’t practice polygamy, right? But we’ll go ahead and let Matt give his answers.

[2:12:54] Mathew Bowman: Well, there are two buckets, um, just as there are kind of two buckets of evidence that he did. Um, one is that there was a number of instances while he was presumably practicing plural marriage in Navo in the 1840s, of him denying that he was doing that. Um, he gives a famous speech in May of 1844 in which he states that he is not practicing plural marriage, um, under his editorship, The Times and Seasons, which is the newspaper in Nauvoo, publishes a series of statements, um, denying that polygamy is a doctrine of the church.

[2:13:32] Michelle: So I found that to be interesting. He admits that there are these denials. He gives us, I think, two examples, doesn’t quote from either of them, and frames them as he’s practicing polygamy while he’s saying these things, right? And I’m just gonna let, like, like Whitney, why don’t you start? Oh, go ahead, Karen. Yes,

[2:13:53] Karen Hyatt: I have to say, it made me, I was like, the tone, it was the tone. This, he, yeah, he, he made a speech where he said he didn’t do it. and they published it in time of the season. He was the editor, but he did that. That is a rhetorical device to put it in that sort of a tone which just conveys, you don’t need to worry about it. You don’t need to look at that. It’s just, it’s not very important. It’s completely important. That’s the crux of the whole thing. Every time Joseph opened his mouth about polygamy, it was to condemn it. So to say it in that tone that dismissively like that just kind of fried me for a minute. I had to How to breathe.

[2:14:33] Michelle: That’s good. Well,

[2:14:34] Whitney Horning: and it, and putting it that way, as you’re saying, Karen, it also, he makes it sound like there are only 2 times, and there was the one speech that was then printed in a time, so all of our work, everything we’re hanging our hat on is just that, that, that one speech. That’s all he did. It’s just that one tiny, so not even enough for a bucket. He said there’s 2 buckets. That’s like a not even a thimble, right?

[2:15:03] Michelle: It’s a sacrament cup, yeah.

[2:15:06] Whitney Horning: There you go. So when I started doing the research that led me to writing my book, when I first had the thought to write a book to exonerate Joseph Smith, I had, I was, um, personally being affected within Friends by the CES letter. And so when I first had that thought, I was thinking it was gonna be a book that would encompass, you know, maybe one chapter on polygamy, one chapter on the book of Abraham, one chapter on, you know, yada yada. And so I started, I thought, well, I’ll start with Plygmy, that’s been a subject that I’ve been very interested in, and I had at that point had finally come to the conclusion for myself that Joseph had never practiced polygamy. So I start gathering the little, you know, thimble full of one talk, and it was one talk after another talk after another talk after another article after another uh publication after it ended up that that was the entire book. was just the evidence is to in my mind now overwhelming and so. I believe that you have to make a conscious choice, and you have to make a choice of if Joseph’s constant denials, constantly teaching out against it, not just once, numerous times, court cases, he sued people for libel and slander and defamation, who claimed he was doing polygamy numerous times. Um, so you have to say this man who’s not only fighting it in courts of law, fighting it from the stand, fighting it in the church’s newspaper, creating affidavits and publications that he had missionaries leave and go throughout the world, um, with this pamphlet that he created saying, I didn’t do polygamy, and these are the people who were. Then if that’s all a fraud. Then he is a liar. Like there’s no other way around it. Like it wasn’t just a couple of times, like in his journal, or walking up and down the street saying don’t do polygamy, you know, because I’m the only one who can so wink wink, you know, I really mean something else. Like there when you read how often and how much and how fervently he condemned it. You have to make a conscious choice, and the choice has to be either he was telling the truth, and then, then you need to deal with what all that other evidence means uh that came years later saying he did it. Um, or he was a liar. I mean, there’s just you don’t do that much work that he did to denounce it, um. Just because you, you know, it’s just a wink wink. We’re really doing it. We’re doing, uh, we’re gonna call it, I’m gonna call it polygamy for all you people who are doing it wrong because what I’m doing is a high and holy ordinance called celestial marriage, right? I mean, when you start really studying it, and that’s what I keep wondering, like, Have these historians maybe actually never really studied what he said and did, like, they’re just basically, um, somebody once said like when you have a PhD and you just quote another person with a PhD, then that’s all you need to do is just quote them cause you’re trusting that they actually did the work. And so maybe that’s what’s going on is they’re just quoting other historians and other academics. Um, I don’t know, because it’s just fascinating to me. I think if you just sat down and read even 1/10 of what we’ve all read. I, I wonder if you, if they changed their mind.

[2:19:13] Gwendolyn Wyne: Well, the only books that are out there right now that really compile that is yours, Whitney and Joseph Smith fought Polygamy by Richard and Pamela Price, which they’re not, uh, accredited historians, and they come from the RLE, and you’re not either, so nobody should read that apparently. So if you are only willing to read accredited historians, which this was only, this has only been a thing like this generation, Von Brody wasn’t an accredited historian when she wrote No Man Knows My History, but now looking back, we’re like, well, it was a really groundbreaking work and blah blah blah blah, and then later she got it, she got her her degree. Uh, Juanita

[2:19:54] Michelle: Brooks wasn’t when she wrote on Mountain Meadows, right?

[2:19:57] Karen Hyatt: And you know who else wasn’t is Lester Bush. Lester Bush in 191973 wrote a very scholarly article, um, detailing why the priesthood ban was not instigated by Joseph Smith. And President Kimball got A copy of that. Spencer W. Kimball didn’t say, Oh, he’s not accredited and threw it in the garbage. Like, he read it, and 5 years later, the ban is lifted. That is what I’m hoping for right now. Can we have a Lester Bush moment, you know, 4 little Lesters here and, and many more, you know? And so, anyway, that’s, that’s the whole.

[2:20:37] Michelle: Right? That’s what we can hope for. I wanna, I wanna build on what Whitney was saying too. I want to add to it because in addition to everything else, we have the excommunications, the people he brought up for church trial as well as government trial, the, um, the, the how he put Emma forward in her efforts to fight about it, the entire establishment of the relief Society, right? Like on and on and on. And so what I wanna say because I know some people may take issue with you saying you have to decide if Joseph Smith was telling the truth or not, and he was a liar and they go, yeah, he was a liar. No, because again, moving this into the academic realm of the discussion, this is not good historical practice. Right? We are making the determinations like the historians are making the determinations they’re making based on people’s testimony, based on what people say happened, right? So we have Joseph Smith and Emma Smith. They throughout their lives, tell a consistent story all the time, no variation in, in, in a very, um, like, like you said, Whitney, I don’t know what they could have done more to, to tell the truth on this, right? So to come to that and and then fighting it in court and doing everything that they did. To come to that and just throw it all out, saying, oh, well, there are all these denials. I’ll give you two examples, right? Dismissively. And that is an academic approach to history. I cannot, especially when they say we need to weigh the contemporary evidence more heavily. We need to weigh the firsthand evidence more heavily. We need to, right, we need to weigh the consistent evidence more heavily. I cannot understand for the life of me. How they can claim, like, like, it seems to me they are not practicing what they are, what they preach. It seems to me that this is a bad historical approach to this topic. I know that they think they have these couple of things like the Clayton diaries, which again, I’m sorry. Like, and, and section 132, you’re gonna weigh, like, you’re gonna put this much weight on those sources, right? Like, can we at least give equal weight to something like, oh, I don’t know, that there’s not a child, but we have all of these love letters between Joseph and Emma that we have. Um, what What oh, Whitehead, James Whitehead testifying that nobody else ever came for financial support, that like that there is no evidence. It’s not just that there’s a paucity of evidence. It’s that there is nothing, there should be a lot of evidence of polygamy to this scale. There should be a lot of evidence. There’s nothing. Other than these very questionable sources created by people who we know were trying to make the claim that Joseph was a polygamist in the face of them not having anything to show that Joseph was a polygamist, right? I, I guess I am appalled by how this is treated. It is not a good historical approach.

[2:23:40] Gwendolyn Wyne: I think it’s interesting that Matt when when they say like, well, what is the evidence he starts with what are the with the testimonies because it’s like, you know, the. Testimonies, I mean, they’re, they’re really not evidence. They just fit a historical model, so you have to, you know, if we’re gonna talk about historical models when you put on the historical model of Joseph wasn’t a polygamist, then all these testimonies make perfect sense. But as Whitney said, if you have a different historical model, the testimony simply means he’s a liar or I think that makes him a a textbook sociopath. I mean, and that’s why the CES letter is so effective because they’re like, look what the church says. If he was lying about all these things, then he’s, he’s a terrible person because you can’t say this number of denials at this level of passion and bringing lawsuits and all these things, as you’ve said, and be a mentally stable, morally good person. Right? That’s.

[2:24:35] Michelle: And the other’s not possible. The other point that I have brought out repeatedly is also, it makes no sense. He made it so much harder for himself. If he were polygamist, right? You have to look at what the actual polygamists do, even Brigham, with his grooming in late Navu in 1844, especially 1845, he’s grooming the people. He’s leaving the door open. That’s what we would expect to see. It would make no sense for a polygamist practicing secretly to do this because it’s shooting himself in the foot. So, um, Matt goes on to talk about, um, I think his second Becket. Let me see if that’s what he’s saying here.

[2:25:13] Mathew Bowman: Now, that’s not necessarily evidence that he didn’t.

[2:25:17] Michelle: Let me back up. This is, this is the framing of how they approach. He gives two small examples of Joseph’s denials and then tells us how we should think about them. Joseph’s denials aren’t evidence that he didn’t. The women’s later claims, which are really just hearsay, right? They’re just claiming something 30 years later, that is. The solid evidence that he did that we can’t ignore. All of Joseph’s denials is are evidence that he didn’t. So I’ll continue on with that.

[2:25:44] Karen Hyatt: It was so weird. It was so weird when I listened to that because I didn’t understand what he was saying, and I rewound it and I rewound it, and finally it dawned on me what he was saying. I’m like, Are you, you’re saying that the contemporary evidence that we do have is not evidence at all.

[2:26:04] Mathew Bowman: Times and seasons, publishes a series of statements, um, denying that polygamy is a doctrine of the church. Um, so that’s kind of Now that’s not necessarily evidence that he didn’t practice it, right?

[2:26:16] Dave (Mormon Land): Some, some could argue just the opposite, that that he felt compelled to deny it. Yes.

[2:26:21] Mathew Bowman: Right. But, but if you, if you, if you, if you are inclined to the belief that he did not, though, that might be strong evidence.

[2:26:28] Karen Hyatt: It might be.

[2:26:29] Gwendolyn Wyne: If you have no historical. If you have no historical context, then, then yes, you can think that that is evidence that he, that he was doing it, that he felt the need to deny it. But if you have actually looked at the history of polygamy in America, the Mormons, as they were called at the time, were not the first polygamists. It, it had become associated with restoration groups to the point that Joseph even says at the end of his life. If I hadn’t been, you know, issued one revelation before it was said that I had 7 wives. He’s like, this has always dogged me. Um, beside that, the Cochranites who did practice spiritual wifery as a doctrine, as a restoration doctrine, had been gathered into the church. We have the evidence from Samuel Smith’s and Orson Hyde’s journals in 1831 that there was a belief. In polygamy, and they call it spiritual wifery. They joined the church and they gathered to design, and then, then you’ve got these conferences in the location where all these people are in Saco, Maine, and within Uh, a couple of years, a year or two of these, this, this groundswell of converts from this area that had polygamists, now the church begins to be reproached with the crimes of fornication and polygamy. It’s actually like a really straight line, but obviously, um, polygamy is not like the topic of interest for the people having this discussion because they don’t know that at all, which is a shame.

[2:28:01] Michelle: I, I think that especially the response from the interviewer, but even the statement, it exposes so much about this because I find myself just going What more could Joseph have possibly done? What could he possibly do that would, that would exonerate him? Like, right, what could they do? He did everything in his power, but if all we do is approach it and go, Well, he only said that because that, like, the fact that he said he didn’t do it is just proof that he did it, right? Because, of course, he denied it.

[2:28:37] Karen Hyatt: I’m going nuts. I can’t even. I’m like, Are you serious? Here’s Joseph. Like, it’s an abomination. It’s absolutely, it’s a crime. It’s everything, and it’s condemned. And he’s like, Well, I mean, if you already have the mindset that he didn’t, then it’s going to sound like that. What do you say to that? What do you say to that? I’m at

[2:28:55] Michelle: a loss. I say, be better historians. This is terrible history.

[2:29:01] Gwendolyn Wyne: I think what they want, I think what they want is for Joseph to have been a mind reader, and if he wasn’t a mind reader who was able to just somehow intuit that the traveling high counsel when they went to England had been converted to this doctrine of many wives and concubines, and then when they came back began very quietly teaching it, then obviously he was in on it.

[2:29:23] Michelle: I know hiding it from him while he had all of those callings that you said while he was in hiding, while he was in prison,

[2:29:28] Gwendolyn Wyne: he was John Bennett, while John Bennett, which had emerged separately because John Bennett got there before the 12th, so Joseph kept thinking, John Bennett’s really caused me a lot of problems and didn’t realize that. Guess who else is causing you problems? You’ve got some within your own circle who believe in this. Um, it, it’s just like it’s very strange.

[2:29:50] Michelle: Yeah. He found it out bit by bit, but there is truth to the fact that the polygamy had to be hidden. It did. They had to hide it from Joseph Smith, which is why we See, after Joseph’s death, polygamy explodes. Many, many, many more wives, many more children. So what did it all of a sudden not become super scary in Navvo? Were there no more raid was there no more raiding of houses, looking for diaries or pregnant wives, right? Whitney, do you have anything to add?

[2:30:23] Whitney Horning: Oh, no,

[2:30:24] Karen Hyatt: no, I, hold on. I just realized, I mean, I just realized another thing, the whole, um, well, how could they have all been practicing polygamy right under Joseph’s nose, right? And yet that is exactly Brian Hayes’s claim about Hiram. He literally claims that Hiram’s own brother was engaged in polygamy regularly with over a dozen wives, and Hiram didn’t know, and he was preaching against it because he wasn’t in quote. Joseph’s polygamy inner circle. That is what Brian calls it. And I just put that together, that that is their story about Hiram. So somehow all these guys are, uh, polygamists in under Hirum’s nose, and he didn’t know it, but it’s impossible that they could be polygamists under Joseph’s nose, and he didn’t know it. This is crazy, you guys. This is the worst. Every time I think about it.

[2:31:24] Michelle: And do you know what though? Do you know what, Karen? This is what you’re missing. You have to remember, we have to view Hirum and Joseph through Brigham Young’s lens, right? So Joseph was this big liar, hypocrite, and Hiram was a dummy dumb dumberson. Hyrum was just dumb if you listen to Brigham Young talk about Hiram. So it is possible, you know, and also, Joseph Smith III, 12 years old, almost 12 years old when his father was killed. No clue. His father had, like, that’s one of the things that Judge Philip even acknowledged is that Joseph Smith III was supposed to be the leader of the church after Joseph, that Joseph had blessed um given him that blessing and published that. That’s what Judge Phillip said. And tell me a polygamist, so. Joseph hadn’t taught his son, Joseph’s last words to Emma were, Can you raise my children to be my son to be men like I am, right? But like, so this was happening everywhere under everyone’s nose. Joseph and Emma were fighting all the time. He was abusing her in all of these ways, and Joseph Smith III didn’t have a clue, and Hiram didn’t have a clue. Oh, and Lucy didn’t have a clue. Brigham had to burn her books, right? But, but we have to believe these decades later claims. So good points all around. OK, let’s go on to, this is where Matt brings up his second bucket. He acknowledges there are two buckets, these silly, um, denials that are just proof that he actually did do it, and then this second bucket.

[2:32:53] Mathew Bowman: I mean, that’s the other really uh think category of evidence that he did not, which is the absence of evidence that he did.

[2:33:03] Michelle: That also isn’t evidence that, I mean, like, we could say the same thing. Well, of course, you wouldn’t expect to find evidence that he did because he had to hide it, right? And he again, doesn’t expand on that at all. He just says there’s a lack of evidence. Like the child’s discussion alone is huge,

[2:33:21] Whitney Horning: but it’s worse than that because so this whole episode, really, when you listen to the entire thing. It’s so academic heavy, the the, you know, the historians, the PhDs, those who’ve been in, you know, they accepted academics, which, by saying that they’re saying the polygamy deniers were not. So, right, so they’ve made two camps. And then it’s it’s even worse because then as they go on their lack of academic rigor and um I don’t know what you wanna call it, what they’re accusing us of is so apparent. Like, really, you’re going to say, I I I just can’t believe some of the things that come out of their mouths, but this is one of those that I just was like. Like what Karen said, you had to rewind it and be like, what did they just say? Like, yeah, there’s a lack of evidence he did, which is proof he did. So the lack of evidence that he did proves that he did. I, I’m like, What universe are we in right now?

[2:34:25] Michelle: The denials proved that he did, and we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t be surprised by the lack of evidence because the closer people are in a relationship, the less evidence there is going to be that they were in a relationship, right? Isn’t that what what comes up a little bit later on? Like, you shouldn’t expect to find evidence of married couples being in a relationship cause that wouldn’t exist, right? So yeah, that was, and, and I will add the things that we already discussed like all of the evidence that he left out, we just went over all of it, but, you know, like all of the forgeries, the correspondence between him and, I mean on and on and on. But then Brooke at least jumps in and adds a third category that I think is very important.

[2:35:06] Brooke LeFevre: But the other kind of main thing, the main evidence, if you will, that he didn’t practice polygamy is that his wife, Emma Smith denied that he practiced polygamy for the rest of his life. And so that is the other, like, if you want to believe Joseph Smith’s public speeches, and if you want to believe Emma, then they both claim that he never practiced polygamy.

[2:35:29] Michelle: Yeah, except a couple of things. She misspoke there. It was actually until the end of her life, early life. I’m sure it was just a misspeak. But what I found shocking there too is, again, if you want to believe this way, then you might find that to be compelling evidence. Like

[2:35:49] Gwendolyn Wyne: This is the this is the safe zone of academia is that you can’t ever know things for sure because then that knowing something for sure is like knowing God, right? We don’t know for sure, we can’t know for sure. It just is much more comfortable for them, um, because then it keeps them in this perpetual state of inquiry, but they don’t want to look too close at this.

[2:36:13] Michelle: The reason I don’t buy that is because they never do it in reverse. They never said, if someone wanted to believe that Joseph was a polygamist, they might take these these affidavits seriously. So I, so I don’t buy it, Gwendolyn. I don’t think that’s because it’s only dismissing one side of the argument.

[2:36:29] Gwendolyn Wyne: I completely agree. I think there’s spiritual forces working on this, but the way that They’re, they’re operating in their, in their academic circle is they’re not dealing with the spiritual element. They’re like, this is, this is we’re not being influenced by dark spirits to to refuse to look at this. I mean that’s not even part of this conversation, but I do think it’s interesting that there is not a willingness, as you’re saying, to turn the tables, look at it the other way and say, what if you were trying. What if you wanted to believe that Joseph was a lygamist and it was important to you because your whole career rode on it, what would you have to believe? And it quickly becomes much more conspiratorial when you look at it in that way like, wow, look at all, look at all that had to happen for for this to, to be, to be begun. Joseph really did a number on people.

[2:37:17] Michelle: Excellent point. Another, another thing I like to bring up with Emma, I remember with, um, Sylvia Lyon, they gave all of this weight and still do, that it was her deathbed confession that Joseph was, um, Josephine’s father, right? They don’t ever acknowledge how many decades later. That was well into the 1915, I think, that Jose Joseph. The Lion wrote that affidavit, and there there’s a lot more to go into on that. But they give all of this weight to its her deathbed confession. It was Emma Smith’s deathbed testimony, right? They never give that any weight? How, how do we, it’s like on her deathbed, she’s still lying about this awful husband. What? I can’t like,

[2:38:04] Karen Hyatt: Aren’t you glad that at least Brooke didn’t say that, you know what I mean? She didn’t say, oh, I think she was lying. Like, Brian Hailes literally was like, I think Joseph the Third was lying when he said his mom denied it. And I was like, at least Brooke is like, no, she denied it every single time she spoke. So I, that made me super happy. So I’m like, good for you.

[2:38:25] Michelle: Yeah, because in fact, the interviewer, because of these common stories that go around, the interviewer actually pushed back. He seemed, or was, like, seemed to believe, said, this is the quote. Did she at some times in her life concede otherwise? Like, she was like, Well, wasn’t, weren’t there times that she admitted it? And that’s when Brooke was like, Well, here, let’s, let’s play. I have Brooke’s response to, weren’t there times that that Emma acknowledged it?

[2:38:50] Brooke LeFevre: Um, and we have other sources where people claim that Emma did know that they were practicing polygamy, but if you take her words, she always denied that they practiced polygamy.

[2:39:02] Michelle: I did love that, but the reason, again, I’m gonna push back against you a little bit, Karen, because she is saying that Emma’s lying because she doesn’t believe her, and she is saying the only way you would believe her is if you were, uh, if you were ideologically committed to believing Joseph was not a polygamist, right? I have hope.

[2:39:22] Karen Hyatt: I can, I can’t crush my hope.

[2:39:25] Michelle: We can hope, we can hope for the best for all of these people. I was happy. I was very happy that she acknowledged that the only claims of Emma being saying Joseph was a polygamist were coming from other people. I wish they would say the same thing more often about Joseph Smith. Right? I’m glad she said it about Emma Smith, but I wish she would give it more credibility. I wish they wish they all would. So yeah, that was good. So, um, this was interesting because I think again the interviewers were taken aback so this is where they went from there.

[2:39:57] Dave (Mormon Land): I’m assuming this is not necessarily an unusual occurrence for historians to discover conflicting evidence. Um, uh, uh, so what do you think when you come across conflicting evidence and, and is there any way to determine the truth?

[2:40:12] Michelle: OK, so I’ll just go right into Matt’s answer. And you guys probably remember this. I just want to ask this question. Whose side does it sound like he’s arguing for? Right? Which side of this debate do you think it sounds like he’s pushing this, this answer was so interesting to me and again, was like, oh, please practice what you preach. This was a great statement on, can we find the truth.

[2:40:37] Mathew Bowman: No, that’s a really good question, right? And, and it is to say, I think a lot of people who Um, are not trained historians or who have not tried to suss out um what actually happened in situations like this, um, maybe under the impression that it’s a lot easier than it actually is to determine things like this. Um, it would be very, very easy, right, if we had a, we say that we did say that we had a signed document from Joseph Smith dated June 1844 where he says, I married the the following woman on the. Dates signed Joseph Smith, right? That seems like it might be definitive. But in fact, um, there would be a lot of questions historians would have about such a document, which is to say the question of provenance, where did this document come from? Um, is it in Joseph Smith’s handwriting? How reliable is it? Um, we cannot simply take, as, um, Brooke has indicated with this discussion of Emma, we also cannot always take historical actors at their word because people lie. memories change over time. That’s very well documented as well. Um, so sources are always tricky. What historians do then is try to get as close as we can, as Brooks says, to the past. Generally speaking, that means contemporary documents are more useful, but not always, um, because of course this question of provenance, where do the documents come from? How do we know about where they were made and when they were written and for what purpose?

[2:42:14] Michelle: Oh, my gosh, I have so much to say to that. Does anyone want to go first or should I just go? OK, I’ll go and then you guys can follow up. So this is what was amazing. I like, again, it sounds to me like he’s arguing for our side. We can’t know for sure. We can’t. And when he said, if we had a signed statement from Joseph Smith saying I married all of these women, then that would be something. Do we have any statements from Joseph Smith saying I did not do this? I didn’t like how many statements do we have from Joseph Smith saying, matter of factly, with complete full finality, that I did not do this. So he’s acknowledging that a statement from Joseph Smith that was that we could prove the provenance of, right? That would be definitive. And yet, help me with that.

[2:43:11] Gwendolyn Wyne: Well, more, more damning is that we have a statement from Joseph Smith reading parts of what becomes section 132 and saying they turned the truth of God into a lie. He

[2:43:24] Michelle: says, reading the affidavits from the the novo expositor,

[2:43:29] Gwendolyn Wyne: which then later we find in section 132 and which which now many historians say, well, this is evidence that Section 132 existed and Joseph wrote it and blah blah blah. And it’s like, well, he actually denied writing it. He had it in his hands and he said, this portion of what’s claimed to be from the revelation that I had, this isn’t what I had. I had something different. So it’s It’s really incredible. This entire thing is so incredible. I really feel like they didn’t, not Brooke does seem to know what’s going on. She seems like she’s done a little or a fair amount of homework on this. I don’t think polygamy is Matt’s thing, and it really shows.

[2:44:12] Michelle: Right, so we’ll go on to the next clip.

[2:44:15] Gwendolyn Wyne: Can I mention one other thing, Michelle? This is where, this is where I think they really lose ground is because again, they will not address the larger issue, which, which is what’s bringing people to this where people have come to know for themselves that polygamy is not of God. Right? And, and so when they say, well, how can we know what’s true, you know, is there any way to know what’s true? It’s like, yeah, I mean, I think there was a scripture. If anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask ask of God that giveth to all men liberally and abraeth not, and it shall be given him. I think there is a way to know truth. And people today are really grabbing onto that and saying, hang on, I can know what’s true. And then once we, I mean, that’s what happened with me. I know Whitney, and that’s what happened with you. You found out, and Michelle, you too. Karen, I’m assuming you’re in this boat as well. We found out polygamy was not of God because we went to God. And once you know that, once you know, then you become a lot more open-minded to saying, hold on, then what happened? Because all these men testified and women testified that polygamy was of God, and it was the highest and holiest form of marriage, and it’s the true nature of God and the only religion practiced in heaven. So once God has revealed to you that they were wrong. They were just wrong, then it opens your mind to say, well, who else was wrong and how were they wrong? Um, and so if you’re, if you’re not willing to accept that there that there is a legitimate um way to find truth, again, I mean, it’s like, it’s like these two opposing things, right? Polygamy is not a God and Joseph wasn’t a polygamist, and they are separate, but they, but they interconnect. In important ways. So it’s interesting that Matt doesn’t, doesn’t seem to want to address the larger issue and then with the, with the more localized issue of was Joseph a lygamist, he kind of doesn’t seem to know the research at all.

[2:46:13] Karen Hyatt: And, um, I will answer your question. That’s not how I came to it. So I always trusted that it would be OK. I, I knew God loved me. I never questioned that he loved me, and I never thought that polygamy meant he didn’t love me. So I had a different take than you guys did, you know? And I just, I, I was like, it seems that was

[2:46:35] Michelle: me too. That was me too. Yeah, I never. I, I converted.

[2:46:40] Karen Hyatt: Right. And I was like, well, and I didn’t, I never thought it was good, but it’s so, I’m somewhere in between, right? You know? And it was like, um, but like Lisa and Heather, I could really that, that episode you did with Lisa and Heather, um, why it matters. Yeah, I could relate. That’s who I related to because I was like, yeah, I trusted. I knew that it would, whatever is Whatever God decrees is going to be fine. I’m not going to get to the other side and be like, What? He would either help me understand something that just is completely puzzling here or whatever. But I watched Rob Fotheringham’s video, which I know a lot of people have called Who Was the first polygamist, Brigham or Joseph, and he had all the receipts. He was like, Here’s what Brigham said. Here’s what Joseph said. And I was like, What? And it was so funny because, um, Rob, the only thing he didn’t do was put links in his description, you know, but he showed you screenshots and you could see the little URL on the screenshots when they’re squinting at it and typing it into my computer to see if these are. Because these are crazy what he’s saying. Never heard this. I’ve never heard Joseph say this, and Brigham say these crazy things about Emma and stuff. So I looked at it and I looked them up and they were all legit, and they were all on the Joseph Smith papers. They’re all right there. You see the actual documents. And I’m like, Done because it clicked. It was like, oh my gosh, no wonder. Yep, that makes so much more sense. And that’s when the confirmation came just like the enlightenment that Joseph describes when you feel the spirit. It’s like, oh my word, that makes so much more sense. Of course, they made it up later. Oh my, how did I not see this before? So, yeah, super embarrassing that I ever believed it, but that makes so much more sense. It was so.

[2:48:30] Michelle: I, I love that. I love that we have both sides represented. Like, well, I think, I think, Gwendolyn, you also came to it, because you, I remember when you reached out to me and you were like, oh my gosh, you were writing a paper on polygamy, still thinking it was of God, still think it was of Joseph Smith trying to make it make sense until your mind open to this other perspective. That’s, that’s my, you know, but so I think

[2:48:51] Gwendolyn Wyne: that I knew it, I knew it wasn’t, I, I knew it wasn’t, um, of God, but I thought God allowed it. By that point, but I still totally assumed that Joseph was, was a polygamist, and I was like, none of that really makes sense to me. But then again, God allows people on earth and maybe it was just kind of a temporal thing that that God even, I don’t know, I wasn’t like when you, when you came out, I was like. Oh, duh, it’s not of God at all. Not just an eternity, but also here. And so that was what clicked for me because I knew, I’m like, this is not the nature of God. It’s not part of God’s eternal plan. But you know, in a fallen world, sometimes things have to happen to make stuff work. And now, and then once you came out, I was like, oh, yeah, of course.

[2:49:36] Michelle: And see, that’s what I think that, that I think that this comes together in a really cool way and study it out in your mind and in your heart. I think both are necessary. I, I don’t, I like, I wouldn’t. Take something that I have no idea about and pray and expect to get an answer that I can that I can trust, you know. And I also, I think that there is something to that, knowing that, aha, like we call it a light bulb, you know, to me, that is the confirmation that we’re talking about. And I think that that’s what all of us experienced. We were trying to make something. Well, for me, I was, I’m embarrassed to say it now, but I was just a fully converted polygamist. I thought someday we’ll be able to live this higher, holier principle, and then we’ll establish Zion, and it’ll be so great because God will be able to come, right? That was what I thought. And so when I started studying, I was like, how, how do I know nothing about what the scriptures say about this? I read the scriptures all the time, right? And so there’s some, and then, and then it threw me into massive cognitive dissonance. I was in such extreme cognitive dissonance when I was studying what the scriptures actually say about polygamy, and that’s when I had to discuss it, right? And then I again, I had to Figure out what does this mean about Joseph Smith. So for me it was like, OK, this is not of God. And Joseph was killed. Must have been because he was involved in polygamy. I knew he wasn’t doing what Brigham was doing, but he was involved, right? So that was my process. But the thing that I, I want to say is when we are talking about the spirit, the historians shouldn’t throw it out. The academics shouldn’t throw it out because of what it really is is that. Oh my gosh, that moment of knowing, that light and knowledge coming in, right? That’s what we’re talking about, and it is your mind as well as your heart. So I, so I don’t think they need to be separated like this. I don’t, I wouldn’t recommend to someone. Don’t, don’t look at any of our research. Don’t look at any, just go pray about it, and whatever answer you get is what the answer is. Like, I don’t think that’s a good way to come to knowledge, right? I think we should study it out in our minds, which is what we’re doing. And then I think when it clicks for somebody, they should be able to go, oh my gosh, that makes so much sense, and be able to trust that, and that shouldn’t be laughed at by, um, by anybody, right? So I think they come together in good ways.

[2:51:53] Karen Hyatt: President Nelson, in his first talk as president of the church, in that talk, it says, I believe good inspiration is based on good information. And I’m like, spot on. So I was like, yeah, that’s great. Can we do that? Can we do that one?

[2:52:12] Michelle: Yeah, and that’s what is troubling is that really, huh, I, I get discouraged that right now the best thing the church has going forward on this topic is the ignorance of the people. That people aren’t really delving in to learn about it. That’s unfortunate. And what I’m realizing is that’s the best thing the historians have going for them as well, right? Is that that they just get to say what they’re going to say because the people haven’t done the research themselves. So I think just like, um, like Whitney, you talked quite a bit about how the relief society was started. Large part, so that the women could be instructed so that they would have better defenses against the lies of John Bennett and the like, right? And I guess that’s part of what we’re trying to do is instruct people so that they won’t be so easily taken in by these false claims. So, OK, we’ll go on to listen to more of what Matt says.

[2:53:05] Mathew Bowman: What is the truth, right? Well, we can very rarely nail it down 100%. Just as in a trial, um, with attorneys, right? Sometimes the best we can do is to say the preponderance of evidence points to this.

[2:53:21] Michelle: So again, we can Know the truth 100%, right? And I think that again is a cop out. Whitney, you haven’t said anything for a while. You go first on this one, or unless you don’t have anything to say and I’m throwing you on this.

[2:53:33] Whitney Horning: And we can’t know the truth 100%. And so therefore dismiss people like us. I guess, no, that was a little confusing to me. I don’t, I didn’t quite understand his point. I felt like, so for me, the overall feeling I had about this episode. Is that they wanted to have him on because he’d written the article, um. And that it’s kind of like, I don’t, I don’t know if I want uh I I don’t want to say what their motivations are, but they don’t seem to really be that well versed in the polygamy field. And so it feels like we’re kind of catching um. Some Uh, popularity, I don’t, I don’t wanna say popularity, but we’re kind of catching on. We’re becoming this thing that they’ve got to reckon with. And it’s a way for them, if they reckon with us, then they get their name out there and maybe, so they’re kind of like, you know, writing coattails, maybe a little bit, right? And so

[2:54:40] Michelle: I can see that. I bet a lot more people know who Matt Bowman is after this article and this episode, especially us doing this episode on it. That’s interesting. OK.

[2:54:49] Whitney Horning: Right. Well, I just don’t understand why you’d want to, to dip your toe into this if, if it wasn’t something you felt passionate about and you’d only feel passionate about it if you know about it. And, and it seems pretty apparent that they don’t really know much. Uh, other than just what um is always said, kind of, you know, just the catchphrases, right? Right, or just a catchphrase is that, hey, the history’s been settled, it’s all been done. Many historians who are very credentialed have already handled it and it’s a signed, sealed and delivered, right? So for him, so I do feel like this whole episode felt to me almost more like an apologetic episode, maybe a little bit more of a fair Mormon flavor to it. Like it felt very apologetic. And and I, um, right in the very beginning of my book, I am very honest and candid where, and I say, I, and the only way I could open my mind to whether or not There’s another explanation for polygamy other than Joseph Smith doing it, was I had to overcome my apologetic tendencies. I had lived my whole life, um, defending the church against anti-Mormon propaganda or anti-Mormon literature, and so I was very much had to realize that I had become an apologetic. And so I felt like this episode really was I felt like they, they were trying to be nice to us. In a way, um. But they also didn’t want to give us too much credit, and so then they, so then there would be some backhanded compliments, but the overarching feeling of this is it’s an apologetic episode. The whole thing really, and they, they throw it out in little bits and pieces about, well, those deniers, then what about Brigham Young? And so then they just want to pin it all on Brigham Young and it really becomes, you know, they’re speaking out against the church and it kind of turns into Really they don’t have anything of value that can actually counteract our arguments because we do know the documents, we do know the history, and we’re learning it more and more all the time. And they are relying on past historians’ work, who didn’t have perhaps access to all the documents we have today. And so it felt like it very much became just this apologetic, hey, don’t listen to them. If you listen to them, you’re, you’re going against the church and so stay in this nice little bubble. Listen to the historians, the history settled, listen to us and listen to, and then you’ll be safe in the church. Like that’s kind of what it felt like to me, and I thought. It’s just the feeling I have a lot of times when I listen to historians, the scripture comes into my mind, ever learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth. And I I guess I just for me, I, I want truth and I wanted, I want the truth that the Lord has available and that It gives cognitive dissonance, it shakes you up, it shakes up your foundation, but if your foundation is one who wants to know the true and living God. Then as that, as you get shaken up, you’re gonna you’re gonna shake away all the dross and all the sand and all the little stuff that doesn’t serve you, and you’re going to be left with that foundation. And so don’t be afraid of it. And I feel like these episodes are trying to instill a little bit of fear. This one not as much as some of the others I’ve heard, but they, there’s still a little bit of like Hey, don’t listen to anybody who’s not us because we’re, you know, we’re the ones who have truth. And that very much feels like, um, Caiaphas in Christ day, right? Like, don’t go after this wild man, you know, we have the truth. Stick with us, stick with our love of Moses, stick with, you know, And it and it is safer. It’s like, like we’ve all talked about, um,

[2:59:07] Michelle: it’s more comfortable.

[2:59:08] Whitney Horning: Yeah, and it can really shake you up and and But um I guess at the end of the day, you gotta decide what do you want? Like Gwendolyn, I love that you brought up that, you know, the scripture, if any of you lack wisdom. Mormonism started because of that scripture, because Joseph had for a couple of years been searching truth, searching for truth, reading scripture, visiting, doing his homework, going to different religions, studying them. Um, it wasn’t just like in the, the way it’s laid out, it’s like, oh, I had a question, and on the next day I went and prayed. It wasn’t that way at all. It was a couple of years of him searching and seeking and studying. And then reading that scripture, he was like, I have no other recourse but to ask God because I can’t figure it out. And he actually in one area of his history talks about, he kind of decided maybe the Methodists were the ones. And so when you went out to pray, it was with the idea that maybe it is the Methodist, but I’m really not sure, but I’ve studied a lot and I can’t figure it out, so I need your help now, God. Right. So, um, it’s study, it takes time, it takes effort, it takes study, and it’s OK if you don’t wanna know about it, that’s fine. If you do, don’t let these kind of episodes that um that Mormonland put out. There’s a little bit of this fear and a little bit of apologetics and you’ve got to overcome those if you want to get to truth.

[3:00:47] Michelle: Excellent. I have to, when you said, um, I’m pushing back on all of you a little bit. I loved what you said, but you said they were being a little bit nice to us and then backhand. I don’t actually think it’s that at all. I think that they are realizing they can’t get away with what they used to say. So they’re having to at least speak in a way that makes us think that they’re practicing good historical. Um, practice, right? But they’re practicing good historical principles when they’re actually not applying them to this conversation. That’s why it’s so back and forth where you’re kind of like, this doesn’t make sense at all. That’s what I think is happening, right? But,

[3:01:25] Karen Hyatt: but I like I have friends who I, I give them more of the benefit of the doubt like Whitney does, like, uh, because I have friends that I mean, they’ve just never thought of it. And that’s what these guys, I mean, they’re church members too. They’ve grown up with the stories the whole life. So to make that big switch, especially when you’re ensconced in the academic world, that’s like, don’t be ridiculous and listen to anything else.

[3:01:50] Gwendolyn Wyne: Whitney was saying, um, that I, you were saying you weren’t sure exactly why he felt. needed to write the article and I think that it’s because he is the Howard W. Hunter chair at Claremont Mormon Studies. It was a huge effort to get a Mormon studies at Claremont, and Richard Bushman was the first Howard W. Hunter chair. Patrick Mason was the 2nd. Matt Bowman is the 3rd. He is the spokesperson for Mormon Academia. So there is a groundswell happening and he got the word is what I, I don’t know personally, but I’m just going by what, what’s happening here. He seems to have gotten the word you need to address this and shut it down because we’ve got a lot of people believing something which is just totally contrary to academic consensus, but we have to just Be willing to be like a child and set aside our pride, set aside all of our academic credentials, and really seek out answers because there are answers. You’re not going to get down to the final answer if you insist on wearing the garb of academia because there are no true answers in academia. It’s forever wondering, um, wondering what could be.

[3:03:03] Michelle: Ever learning, never able to come to a knowledge of the truth, right? So I love what you guys are saying. I just want to make the point that to bring this back to the specific topic at hand. Is anybody, he says we can’t know anything 100%. Is anybody asking the question of whether or not Brigham Young was a polygamist? Right? Can we know that pretty close to 100%? It’s like, that’s pretty well settled, right? If we want to talk about settled history, is anyone asking if Joseph and Emma were married? Right? Like, there are things that we absolutely know. With enough certainty, that they want to put this in that category. And I think what we are arguing is it absolutely does not belong in that category. So saying, like punting by saying we can’t know things 100% in order to justify expressing certainty or near certainty on this topic is massively, it’s not just a cop out, it’s dishonest, right? If, like, we can all agree with you, Brigham Young was a polygamist. No valid conversation to be had there for very many reasons. Joseph Smith’s polygamy, by your own admissions of the spotty history, of the paucity of the problems with the appetite’s like all of this. You, we need to stop. And, um, Gwendolyn, I really, really appreciated your explanation of why maybe Matt did this. That I, that was really good for me to hear and makes so much sense for me and gives me a lot more. Um, I’ve had good feelings toward Matt, you know, but this, that gives me a lot more compassion, that maybe he was tagged, called on to say, hey, we need to get ahead of this, and you’re the guy. And so that I’m really, really glad you brought that up because I’m like, oh, it kind of gives me the same like, who was it? Elder Nelson elder, um, Christopherson, who was called on to do the, um, interview to try to apologize for the 2015 policy of exclusion is what it’s called. And, and it was so bad, but it was like he was assigned and, and so you just go, oh, that’s harsh, you know, like Todd, his brother Tom, his brother talks about the phone call afterwards. So it’s good for me to hear. I’m just I’m just going to assume that that’s the case cause it makes more sense than anything else I’ve thought of. So thank you for sharing that. So Brooke gives her response to um how good historians work, and this was one of my favorite clips from the entire theme.

[3:05:40] Brooke LeFevre: History is inherently, it’s a discipline in which we argue with each other and we, we try to reinterpret things and we analyze evidence and um we’re constantly kind of Making new arguments and reinterpreting the past um as we try to figure out what happened. Um, so I, there’s nothing that’s you know sure in history and every time we get new evidence, we will reanalyze and uh re-evaluate the narratives that we’ve been telling.

[3:06:11] Michelle: Is that amazing? I think she, so that’s what I wanna say like be good historian. She says if we’re good historians, then we do these things. This is exactly what we are arguing for. Be good historians, please. My gosh, you guys, we have been going for such a long time and we are halfway through. There is so much to talk about here, but I think this has been an excellent conversation so far. I know that it’s way late for some of you and way early for others. So I think we’re gonna call it a night right now and then continue with our discussion. I hope. I, I have found this to be extremely valuable. So I love when we have new insights while we are discussing, but I want to thank each of you for being willing to come and talk to me about this episode. And I’m really excited for our next conversation. I think it’s actually gonna be the better part. So thank you all, and I will see you soon. Wow, thank you to those of you who made it all the way to the end. I would love to hear your thoughts and your comments. It is so great to be able to share these ideas. That’s why I love the panel discussions to be able to go back and forth with different people, and we are able to do that in the comments as well. So thank you for joining us, and I will look forward to seeing you next time.